Last time we talked about the meditation method of SEEING THE LIGHT. You can find the whole article, with corrections, on the blog. People always ask how they can help our site and I tell them to create links to pages of importance using the free services like HUBPAGES, SQUIDOO, WORDPRESS.com (not .org), BLOGGER, and bookmarking. The more links you create to our pages, the easier it is for the google search engine to place us on page one where people will read the article. Otherwise, no one will find it. You want some merit in the direction of cultivation? Find some articles (not necessarily from us, though of course we’d like them to be ours) create links with the relevant keywords, and that will enable others to find the same article you found useful. Costs you nothing except time: hubpages.com, squidoo.com, wordpress.com, blogger.com, and book marking. Trust me, this HELPS A LOT in spreading the lessons!

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And now for the promised lesson on Kuan Yin’s Method of Hearing Sound …

Along with life there is usually hearing, seeing, and knowing. Seeing is a type of knowing that relies on the eyes, something we dealt with last time. Once you see something you also know. “I see” means “I understand this,” so seeing is also a form of knowing.

For seeing you need several karmic conditions. One of them is light. Without light, you cannot see anything. Color is a form phenomenon, an appearance phenomenon. Night time is dark color, day time is bright color. We’re always surrounded by light/color no matter what, which we went over last time. Pitch blackness is a color and is therefore light, not the “absence of light.” It’s just a different colored light that awareness can know.

Some beings like dark light and some like bright light. Whether they like one or the other is a function of their karma, so in the universe don’t think bright is better than dark. If you said so, a bunch of animals would certainly disagree with you. In any case, light is one of the conditions for seeing. You must see something and what you see is light that has form. Forms and appearances are light.

The second item is hearing. Hearing does not need light as a precondition to take place. Also, when you hear something it is another kind of knowing. Its very existence is also empty just as we found with light, colors, energy and appearances last time. You cannot grab onto hearing or sounds. Sounds don’t stay, they are ungraspable, they are illusions like a dream — EMPTY rather than solid and real because they never stay unchanged.

In the Surangama Sutra, it’s said that when we use our eyes and see that the boundary of seeing or vision is limited — we only see about 30% of what’s around us. We have to turn our head left and right and backwards to see everything, so we’re only seeing about 30% unless we do that. For HEARING, however, unlike seeing the proportion of efficiency is more like 100%. Doesn’t matter where the sound comes from, you can hear it. There’s no natural blockage or limit. Sound therefore is a more efficient method for cultivation.

The Buddha Manjushri said in this world there is a clear and clean teaching of sound. Sound and chi are closely related. The reason we hear is because of chi — chi (air) can transmit sound. CHI means ENERGY. It exists in all directions, so in the Surangama Sutra, Manjushri said the best way to cultivate was to listen to sound. He examined 25 cultivation methods and said for this world, this Earth, this method was the best for human beings. It can help you attain enlightenment quickly.

For example in China people say your ear is connected to the “sea of chi.” That does not mean the dan tien even though names are similar. The “sea of chi” is everywhere. Sounds are everywhere, energy is everywhere all around us every moment, every place.

Our ear (hearing) is connected to the ocean of being (our original nature). People see light all around them but tend to forget about sound. Try to experience hearing and the sea of chi in the universe. Life is within this sea of chi and sound. Hearing is connected to the sea of the original nature.

So here’s the practice. It has three steps to it.

Step 1: The first step is to let go [of fixating on your thoughts] and you’ll start to hear all the EXTERNAL sounds in the room, in your environment, wherever you are. You don’t have to specifically listen. You don’t have to think about it. You do this all the time — you just hear and know. If you somehow close off the function of hearing, however, then you cannot hear external sounds. For example in rare cases you can become so focused or engaged in some task that you can become totally oblivious to a sound that happens around you. We say you “forget the sound” or “miss the sound” but it just means you’re like a scientist who becomes so absorbed in his work that he becomes oblivious to the sound. That’s turning away from the hearing function.

Now Kuan Yin’s name means “Knowing and Observing Worldly Sounds.” What this means is that you don’t have to search specifically for sounds — they are already there. You just observe them and you know them. Hearing just functions and you know what you hear. It’s not “observation” through the eyes or vision but listening, hearing. Hearing is the observation of sound.

So here’s the practice. You’re sitting in formal meditation or just sitting in a room quietly. You hear some external sounds but let go of the things (sounds) you hear. When you let go you still hear. It’s a natural function, there’s nothing to do, so be relaxed about it. There’s still knowing of sound without any need to strain to listen to a sound, so any straining or focusing is incorrect. That’s using too much force and you can never enter samadhi that way just like you can’t enter samadhi using anapana if you are always counting or focused on the tip of your nose. You just know the air is going in and out of the nostrils when it happens and that’s it — no strain, nothing to think about, you just know it. As to sound, the Zen master Bankei said you walk along and hear a bird sing and naturally know it’s a bird without thinking, right? You don’t have to purposely listen, grab the sound, let go of it or welcome it. Just be there naturally and you can hear and know. There’s nothing to do except relax and be natural.

This is called “entering the flow of sound.” It’s the first stage of this practice. Anyone can do it because you do it all the time. You just never turned it into a cultivation method. “Entering the flow” means letting go of the sound you hear. Let it arise, but don’t analyze it, just know it when it comes. When you notice a sound that’s knowing it — that’s all you need to do. If you practice this, then your mind will gradually become calm by listening to sound. This is entering Kuan Yin’s method.

In another Buddhist sutra it says “the sound of ocean waves, waterfalls, wind blowing, …. you are capable of hearing all these sounds.” Doesn’t matter what these sounds are. All the sounds are “empty” because they cannot be grasped. They cannot be held onto. They are empty because they cannot stay in the mind but are effervescent and must depart. Can you grab onto them and hold them forever? No, so we say they are empty. They are effervescent like light or a reflection in a mirror you cannot grasp. And yet you can hear them … just like you can see light. You don’t need any force, it’s natural, just don’t cling but let go. In fact, the more empty you are (not preoccupied with thoughts and not clinging) the more you can hear. Don’t specifically focus on the sounds but just notice them. This is called “entering the flow of sound.”

Gradually you will realize that all the sounds you hear have nothing to do with you. All the light, colors, images you saw in “seeing the light” practice have nothing to do with you either — they are just there, they transform. They represent energy so are empty because you cannot grab onto energy or make it unchanging. Anything that always changes is empty of reality. As to sound, it is just something that occurs to the mind, something that is experienced by the mind. You didn’t make the sound. You just observe it when it comes. It has nothing to do with you. So there’s no need to wait for it because that’s using force. Just relax, sounds come and you know them and they depart. You don’t even need to let go because they just pass by. “All the sound has nothing to do with me. It just occurs. It’s just there.” This is step one of practice.

Step 2: Gradually you don’t have to listen anymore. The mind quiets down and you connect with emptiness. You experience emptiness. Sound is gone. The sound of silence (as a “mark” in the mind) is gone. You need gong-fu to reach this stage because this is samadhi. Everything quiets down. This stage is called “all the sound that enters quiets down.” It is mental cessation. The monk Han Shan in his autobiography said after practicing Kuan Yin’s method by a waterfall that he reached this state of cessation and stayed in this state for 24 days.

Step 3: There are two states to sound: (1) movement and (2) quietness/silence. When you hear something it’s the moving state of sound. Silence is the quiet state of sound. These two are like birth and death. In this third stage, both states have now disappeared and you meet the original nature. Congratulations, you’ve succeeded.

After this you can have all sorts of miraculous superpowers. That’s why Kuan Yin has 32 special appearances. He will follow the sound (thoughts) and try to help people. He can do that because he’s out of the stream of sound so he’s never confused and can follow it back to the origin. The method is so powerful that Kuan Yin used it to reach enlightenment before Shakyamuni, but came back to be an assistant. Manjushri praised this method, Samantabhadra attained enlightenment by using a hearing technique as well.

Basically, you let go of thoughts to reach a state of inner silence or cessation called samadhi. That’s step 2. Then you let go of samadhi to meet the original nature. That’s step 3. That’s when birth and death, or beingness (existence) and non-existence both cease to be.

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Shakyamuni Buddha used anapana practice extensively to attain enlightenment. After his enlightenment, he undertook three retreats in his life of several months duration each time. During those retreats he extensively practiced anapana.

When his son Rahula came to him asking for instruction on how to attain enlightenment, he taught Rahula anapana. He taught his number one student Mahakasypa (and other students) anapana so he could get the Tao, too. From all this we know that anapana is one of the most important methods of cultivation to reach enlightenment. It is a non-denominational method that can be practiced by every individual. So if you are a member of any religion, there is no harm in practicing it.

Anapana is one of the two methods by which Buddhism gained entry into China due to the effectiveness of its cultivation methods. The two methods that made this possible were anapana and the white skeleton visualization (body impurity) method. The white skeleton visualization method helps lay the foundation for transforming the body and its chi channels for cultivation, and anapana helps you attain enlightenment. Surprisingly, despite its key importance in cultivating for attainment, a strong anapana tradition never made its way into Tibet which is a pity because with anapana it is easier to gain enlightenment than most of the esoteric practices people think are high stage in Tibet! You can read about this on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anapanasati

So how do you practice anapana?

Some people say there are six steps to anapana, such as the Chinese Tien-tai master Chih-i. You can read about this in THE SIX DHARMA GATES TO THE SUBLIME that has recently been translated into English after so many centuries of waiting. Such an important little book and it’s taken years for someone to translate it. People always pick the wrong things to translate rather than the really useful stuff. Amazon.com has it here:

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=meditationexp-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1935413015&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Some people say there are 16 steps to anapana, the last one being to offer everything away. See the following for details:

http://www.meditationexpert.com/meditation-techniques/m_anapanasati_sutra_breathing_yoga_pranayama.html

In the Anapansati Sutra spoken by Buddha, only a few instructional steps were originally recorded that have you watching your breath. Further details were added by later generations of masters, with perhaps the most important addition to this practice understanding being the “Dharmatara Dhyana Sutra” first translated by Buddhabhadra.

This sutra, if translated into English today, would explain anapana and the practice steps and gong-fu of cultivation in a very clear, non-denominational fashion and would revolutionize most all religions. It would blow people away, and I’m praying for a translator to take it on. However, the Dharmataradhyana sutra is very hard to translate, so no one has touched it for about 1000 years. However, it is really the foundational work for the Zen school, and something people should translate if given the chance. But as usual, people spend their time translating almost everything else other than what’s really needed, helpful and useful and will save the most people … like a book of koans or another book of Tibetan yoga for instance. Fun stuff, but doesn’t really help anybody in any major way whereas the foundational practice method for enlightenment, for Zen, and which never made its way into even the Tibetan tradition or western schools remains neglected.

Imagine: Buddha succeeded through anapana, his students succeeded through anapana, Buddhism made its way into China because of anapana, the anapana tradition did not make its way into Tibet in a big way despite its importance, this sutra was key in helping lay the practice foundation for the entire school of Zen and no one, nobody has translated it. See what I mean when I tell people over and over again it is very hard to get the real teachings or really important teachings? And people wonder why the religions don’t have many individuals of high stage attainment or a clear path. This is just another example of the bad karma of human beings. But enough of that …

Let’s turn to practice instructions…

Now in some explanations of anapana, it says you should focus on the tip of your nose. Yoga schools often say that as well. But if you actually focus on the tip of your nose, some people go crazy, so that’s not the meaning at all. How can you enter samadhi if you are actually continually focusing on the nose? People came up with this idea because they did not understand the instructions in the sutra. And if you count your breatsh and focus on the numbers, all you can ever hope for is to become a super  accountant….errrrh… crazy accountant.

The right way to do it is to attain a state so relaxed and comfortable that you forget your body, like being half awake or half asleep. In that state you still know when the breath enters or leaves the nostrils because of awareness. Is there any special effort to this? No! Try it right now. Close your eyes and witness/watch/observe with your mind. Do you know when the breath enters or leaves the nose? Of course. Did you have to make any special effort? No, of course not. When you naturally know the breath enters or leaves the nostrils, that’s the meaning of focusing on the tip of the nose. That’s anapana practice.

Typically your mind stream is in a state of flow, consciousness is a scenario that flows like a river, but the breathing is an in and out event, a discrete event that is separate from what goes on within that flow. It happens despite the flow or contents of consciousness, so you can use it as an anchor to drop the attachment to the tableau. When you concentrate on that breaking phenomena of birth and death, you can detach from the entire flow visage/scenario/continuum/soup that you are in without knowing it, and realize awareness itself.

It is awareness practice that will enable you to eventually separate from consciousness and cultivate pure awareness. From there you can then proceed farther. I’m not going to go into the details how or why or what comes next, just the entry way. You have to practice to prove things for yourself. But here’s one big secret I’m going to share with you: in many schools they tell you to combine your breath with thought. You don’t have to make any effort to do this. You don’t have to try to squeeze the two together or anything like that. Once you know there is breath going in and out the nostrils, that’s the meaning of breath and awareness become one. You know it, so thoughts and breath are unified. Later you attain respiratory cessation and when you know that, they are unified as well. But initially you should consider  just knowing the in and out breath as union.

Eventually with good anapana practice you’ll realize it’s not YOUR awareness, but just “awareness” that knows or “awareness that functions” because the ego quiets down. That’s real progress. Buddha said that the real mind is everywhere, that awareness is everywhere and not within  the body. Therefore it is really universal awareness powering things. You think of awareness as yours because of the habit of hearing thoughts in the head, but it is actually just the universal awareness operating. Thoughts and the chi flow that comes with them are a separate issue.  

The awareness/presence of the internal dialogue or wandering mind  makes you think you are an ego. It’s due in part to the presence of the body anad attachment to its energies and perceptions of which consciousness is one as well. Who said the the thoughts inside of being an ego are correct? Who? To discover the universal nature of awareness that everyone shares, and then what lies beyond, you can use anapana as a route. You can also use Kuan Yin’s method of listening to sound to detach and find the course, but that’s different and we’ll describe it later. When you match the two you’ll see what everybody is after when they seek enlightenment. Each religion … same thing, same end point if they target high enough. Some don’t want the ultimate nature but that’s another story.

People always think it’s THEIR OWN INDIVIDUAL awareness that is functioning and forget that there is only one awareness in the universe that shines through all sentient beings, just like there’s one moon in the sky that is seen in all the puddles below. One moon, 10000 puddles, 10000 moons. Now you knwo the meaning of that Zen story.

That one original awareness shines through all our seeing, hearing, thinking, knowing.  it powers it. It is it. Somehow we combine ideas of being an individual ego with that one awareness shining and get them all mixed up and start clinging to the ego ideas (Buddha described this int he Surangama Sutra), but anapana will help us make things clear. It’s a way to reach the independence of awareness from the scenario that is being witnessed/experienced in consciounsess. Some schools call this “detachment”  and now you know the meaning, for detachment is the process and aarness realizaiton is only the preliminary stage or step of completion. But you have to practice to know that.

You do not make anything new or create anything in anapana but use this observation method to basically cut through delusion-ignorance to see what really is, like using Manjushri’s sword to cut off delusions. Through anapana you can detach from body and mind, mind in this case meaning thoughts and consciousness. When you realize how the ordinary mind really works from self-observation, we call that understanding wisdom. In western schools we call it “Sophia” whereas in Buddhism we call it prajna and in other schools discriminative analysis.

In other words, “you have to know your own mind” means you have to investigate it. Without investigation (Confucius’ term) you’ll never get the Tao, only samadhi states. That’s how Buddhism is different from all the world’s religions. Buddhism stress prajna wisdom, or understanding and analysis of what’s going on. All the religions have samadhi — which produces saints and sages — but if you want answers for everything and analysis, you must turn to Buddhism. Judaism, Islam, Christianity, even Taoism and Confuciansim cannot help you. But you have to investigate which is why even Confucius told you so.

You don’t need to count to do anapana. Just notice the breath going in and then out. Once you notice something else you’ve lost that unity. One other point — for more advanced practitioners. People who practice anapana often notice there is tightness in the body or pain, hotness, cold, etc. Just watch it, obsevre it and it will dissolve. Don’t focus on it or force it.

Once again, to open up the constricted channels causing this in those areas, just notice the area and let it breathe. Some schools use the mental issuance of two silent sounds – HA and HUNG (such as in “soha” or “om mani padme hung”) imagined lightly originating from those knots to help release the channels in those areas so the chi can go through. “Ha” for instance helps you break the tendency to grab and reminds you to give away, to offer. Mantras work, too. So does letting the area dissolve into light or slowly pulsing light THROUGH the area without resistance as you sometimes see in videos of cuttlefish or deep sea pulsing jellyfish.

The point is, you shine light or let light shine without force or obstructions in such a way that the tissues relax. If you use skeleton visualization on the spot, you just imagine the area is the underlying skelton for a single fraction of a moment, and then let go. Repeat if required. Liek shampoos say: wash, rinse, repeat … but only repatif necessary and not necessarily immediately. The areas open up if you practice emptiness, so don’t use force.

Always use the out breath to recite these sounds. The skeleton visualization is another method to help loosen knotos — in a fraction of ta second you just know you are a skeelton, let go and you are done. That’s real white skeleton visualization practice, but people ordinarily think they need to use force.

Just never try to force a knot to open. That’s incorrect Tao school, yoga and esoteric school practice. “Hung” is a more forceful sound than “ha” if you must use a little extra strength dissolution method. There are lots of helpful practice techniques like this at the earliest stages of the path, but don’t turn the method into qi-gong. It’s watching the breath, not anything else though Mencius called it “cultivating the breath” because when you watch the breath and let go, you eventually can let go of the body and realize the body of universal awareness with its own type of universal chi. But only a cultivator can do it. The point is, you can use anapana to help transform your body. It’s pretty darn easy to do so when you practice anapana correctly.

If you follow your breathing in and out the tip of the nose, as you get better at it you can eventually switch the focus to the middle of the nose, then the upper bridge and then the third eye location of the Ajna chakra. A really talented practitioner can even do breathing through all his chakras, but not beginners at the earliest stages of practice. When you reach this point you can use anapana to rejuvenate yourself with energy, or even to extend your life for long periods of time if your chakras and channels are all open. That’s why Buddha, Tsong Khapa and several other great enlightened masters were able to order several of their students to stay living in this world until the next Buddha. Many traditions have this. You can transform the entire body to be able to do this and reach a stage not only of the Arhats where the body can appear and disappear at will, but even further. When this happens the entire body and cells fill with chi and you can let go of the body to enter into dhyana. You don’t hold on to that state but just fill with chi and let go.

Know when the air flows through the nostrils. You don’t focus on the in breath or out breath but just know that the in and out of the air is there. You can feel it in the nostrils. The whole idea is to forget the body and detach from the realm of chi/energy associated with the ordinary panorama of consciousness. You want to start to cultivate AWARENESS without clinging. Let go of everything. Then you can enter into the first dhyana. In the first and second dhyana you’ll always be happy and blissful, you’ll forget about hunger and sex, and will be able to leave the world at will. If you don’t want to be here anymore, with one thought you can depart.

In order to better relax and forget the body when you practice anapana, it helps to first understand some basic principles of cultivation practice. This is not “theory” but truth. Everything you see right now is your mind. Everything you see, hear, feel, taste, smell is your mind that you are experiencing. PAUSE right now and think about what you just read. You only ever experience your mind and nothing else. In fact, you can never experience anything else other than your mind.

What do you think you are experiencing, the world? Ridiculous. You are only knowing your own mind. You sense the world and those senses are turned into images of consciousness, so you only ever experience mental states, ie. consciousness or mind. Think about it. .. Take your time to pause and think about it as this article will still be here. No reason to rush ahead.

Now because the mind is changeable like a dream, it’s unreal and yet there is an appearance  there. So what appears to be there is both real and unreal, or let’s say neither real nor unreal. And because you only ever experience your own mind, that’s why there is no inside or outside, no in or out, no coming or going. You are always within consciousness, and the cloud of  consciousness that flows is within mind but you think it’s the external world. WHy? Because you forgot, you didn’t do this analysis. Your prajna wisdom is not active.

The real mind that knows always stays, is non-moving, still. The movie scenes change but the projection screen never changes, is always empty, still, silent, true and knows. We think consciousness is the mind, but it is the contents of the mind. The true self that’s real, dependable, never moves, never comes nor goes, that’s pure, eternal, blissful is the One fundamental nature that has the power of awareness as just one of its myriad infinite functions, and so we often call This the One Mind or true mind of reality. That’s what Zen calls the original nature. You usually call this “God” but It is not a person or being or state or anything you can call existence or non-existence. You can only find it through cultivation and by   wisdom analysis, which we call  “prajna.” That means understanding all this. You also need merit to rediscover your true self which is why I always tell people to do good deeds and clarify their behavior. Don’t think you can just meditate and Bingo-Presto you get it. Sorry Charlie.

As an example using sight, your physical eyes translate visual signals into consciousness and this is what you experience — consciousness only, a mental continuum of images — consciousness only. So you are only ever experiencing your OWN MIND. That being the case, whatever you see, hear, feel, touch is you. You can now relax during meditation. You only ever experience YOU. The world you see is YOU that you are experiencing. Why? Because it’s your mind, your mental images, your consciousness, you. You only ever experience your own consciousness, i.e. YOU.

That being the case, let go. There’s nothing to figure out because you are that knowing nature and can know, and when you need to figure out something you will. It will always be you which does this. Who cares what arises — pain, pleasure, emptiness, whatever. It will always be you. You might not figure out things correctly but the experiencer will alwasy be YOU. Later, we can talk about no expereince, no experiencer, no experiencing but right now at this stage stick with this.

Other people are also always experiencing only themselves. And since everyone is experiencing the same environment, you will eventually realize that the underlying foundation of everyone’s consciousness is the same. There is just an illusion of separation, of individuality that we cling to out of ignorance. Everyone is a Buddha. Everyone is the same original nature shining awareness. The proof is more robust than that, but the words should give you some faith in the one original nature. It is the ultimate source of both matter and mind, but we use awareness to reach it. You’re not an exception and everyone else is It. It is ALL It.

You can never find your original nature through the avenue of science that investigates matter or energy either. Ridiculous. Never. Billions and trillions of dollars and effort every year … even to know why a salamander changes color or something like that … but not a drop for cultivation. Amazing. You must experience all this within your own mind by tracing awareness back to its empty source and then your body — composed of hardened chi or energy — will start to transform just as the whole dream plane is transforming. Why hold on to things if that’s the way it really is? You can’t make an illusion into something real no matter how hard you can try. You can only drop into pain, suffering,  ignorance and discomfort. You can revolve around in miserable states forever.

After you see the Tao, that’s when masters can cultivate the sambhogakaya, or perfected human body and “beautified” or purified chi bodies. After they see the Tao by letting go of thoughts, their chi starts to move because the universe is moving and alwasy trasnfrorming; thoughts hold the body and it’s chi in artifical shapes we are not. If you try to cultivate the body ahead of gaining the right view there’s just no way anyone succeeds. They all think they will, but none do. Same story in Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, yoga, kaballists, western alchemy, Shinto, you name it. But let’s not go into that because we want to talk about anapana which incidentally, does help your transform the body while helping you reach the Tao. No other method is safer. No other method is as useful in terms of banishing sickness and extending the life, as well as opening up chakras, chi channels and so forth. So if you want enlightenment into the original nature, the original mind then practice anapana. If you want to transform your karmic body into the sambhogakaya reward body of purified chi and purified karma, then practice anapana.

There’s no inside or outside of the mind or your head. You hear thoughts in your head and feel the back of the skull when you meditate, but open your eyes and you see the world. Inside-outside, eyes opened or eyes shut, dreaming or waking states, awake or asleep — it’s all the same one thing: consciousness.  It’s not light or dark, long or short but consciousness. Knowing the mind’s  true nature, we call this the “light of awareness.” It’s pristine, clean, pure, stainless,  immovable, present. It’s all you so there is no difference in terms of the experience being consciousness or not consciousness. There is always awareness. The contents of awareness are consciousness, so you can relax because awareness will always be there but the contents will always be changing, just like in a dream. You cannot hold on to them. To hold on to them is samadhi. Awareness will alwasy be there so you will neevr be alone. That’s why we say there is a Buddha everywhere.

Energy will always be there too. Energy is the substance of consciousness. Chi and consciousness are linked because chi is energy and consciousness is appearance. It’s like two sides of a coin in that both go together. That is, only at the low stages of the path. In terms of the ultimate, there is no such thing — no such thing as chi or consciousness. (1) Or you can say the “substance” or “essence” is the most purified chi, so pure that it’s no longer chi, no longer there, so that there is nothing any longer. It’s empty of everything including chi and mind and that’s essence. (2) Or you can say that consciousness becomes so pure, so still, so unmoving, so absent of suffering, marks and undulations that there is no consciousness any longer. There is emptiness or void. It’s not a “thing” that’s empty because what is real is that absence of everything, including what we call emptiness.

Emptiness that you are thinking about is an image, and it’s not empty space, empty consciousness, or even nothingness. We just call it EMPTY. We use those words to denote negation of anything we might know … any phenomena, experience, existence in general etc. So some schools say empty, some say pure consciousness, some say no consciousness at all. Some use words like awareness, clear light, perception, being, reality or existence. So the original nature that is right now this very moment is empty yet where we have this world of appearance that seems to be here but is unreal, so you cannot say it’s non-existence if this is here, and you cannot say what’s here is real if it doesn’t stay and is as changeable and effervescent as a dream, which it is but you just don’t know it. You just think it’s stable because you’ve created that thought habit in yourself and it’s becomes a set of colored lens that attached rigid edges onto everything in such a way that you take all things as individual units. But everything interpenetrates and is connected to everything else in one big soup, one big jewled net of Indra … every atoms, cell, electron is like this.

There are no individual units of anything, just a false perception of individuality and separate units formed through aeons of wrong habit energy. meditation is to let go of habit energies through detachment, and detachment through wisdom, and through wisdom to let go of saamdhi to reach the One behind. Even to take things as a single agglomeration is wrong because that “one agglomeration” means you’ve abandoned emptiness – you’ve got an image of “one” in your mind. The highest Tao is not emptiness, but neither emptiness nor existence. But don’t cling to that either, for the duality of knowing and not knowing are both functions of the original nature. Seems you cannot escape. It’s one big circle/whole. The two are the same, nirvana and samsara are one and you get there through the mind, i.e. meditation. That’s the only way. Not through cultivating the body. But anapana will help you cultivate both mind a body — a double whammy that saves precious time. If you are old if will help restore you, too.

That’s just my way of explaining it, not the real truth of the matter. I’m skipping facts and details to write a brief article. It’s just to help you for this method, so don’t take those words as the ultimate. Just use them to help.

You just experience different pictures or images in consciousness but it’s still the same one consciousness. The same thing that gives birth to awarness you had as a child is the same one you have today, but the flow has changed all along. It is the same thing standing behind awareness you have right now, isn’t it? THAT – which you think of as YOU – has not changed, has it? It hasn’t aged, has it? The body has aged, the contents or flow of consciousness has changed, but now you know the body is not you. The purest empty consciousness that has not aged, that is the awareness that has not aged, that is the base of awareness that we call the non-moving empty original nature  and THAT is the real you.

Sometimes for colloquial sake we call it “consciousness” to be lax, so you have to be forgiving and always interpret correctly. Many schools don’t get the terminology correct and it confuses people — mind, consciousness, empty, awareness. Sometimes they mean the same thing and sometimes not, so it’s confusing. It confuses the hell out of me too but we have to deal with all these different cultures and writings. In Tibet they just call it clear light, so you have all these different competing terminologies. The point is, that’s all you ever experience so close your eyes with anapana practice, let go and relax because it will alwasy be there and the contents of consciousness will change so don’t bother to hold on. You already know everything. You know when there is an in-breath in the nostrils and when there is an out-breath. Nothing will change, you’re not missing anything, just let go of thoughts and notice the breath and detach.

One day you definitely will be old and gray but that one pure consciousness will never move or age. Your eyes may not work, your body may be sick or failing, but those are new scenarios of consciousness. They are not you. You will still be able to think and know, maybe not clearly, but mentation (whatever it is, however good or bad, crippled, crazy, insane, coma-like or perfect) are contents of consciousness. The knowing comes from the real you. Even if you get Alzheimers or dementia and lose your mind, there will be knowing of the contents of consciousness. Who said the contents are all good or will always be good or are not like a broken machine? Those contents — thoughts — are not you but passing scenery. Good or bad, whatever you expereince — that’s karma. That’s why you cultivate — to change that fate. Current fate and future fate. Future fate for this life and future fate for subsequent lives.

The different worldview, mind stream, cultural concepts, even access to cultivation teachings will change next time around. Don’t count on the fact you’ll be Jewish again, or a girl, or tall, or Chinese, or Hindu/Muslim, or rich or naturally musically talented or athletic … Most important of all, cultivation teachings that help you surmount all this and become the master and end suffering and increase your ability  to do things for the world — they might be there and might be denied. Depends on your merits so hurry to cultivate and make progress and plant the seeds now. You WILL die and get a new life with a different sex, race, body, worldview, etc. maybe even become an animal, hungry ghost, heavenly being, whatever.  Then all the pain and suffering and ignorance and yet more mistakes repeat over and over again with changing consciousness, with pain and suffering until you decide to cultivate and jump out of the control of consciousness by no longer following along. Only the tableau of consciousness contents changes. Everything is always transforming.

Forget this New Age idea of evolution: “Each life I’m learning a new lesson  and getting better.”  Bullshit. There’s no guarantee of that or anything at all. Look around at the most painful conditions in the world and that’s your future fate at some point in itme. Has to be, especially if it happens to the world’s majority. No one has good karma forever. SO JUMP OUT OF IT ENTIRELY. Work to do it now. “Evolution” lasts forever. It just means “transformation” and who says transformation is always upwards and for the better? That’s science fiction nonsense. Transformation is just transformation and better is because of good deeds and merit.

Don’t let the last 100 years of human progress fool you. There are countless worlds, realms, etc. in different states and different trajectories and who knows what’s around the corner. Did you even predict this recession? If not, don’t talk wishy-washy love-the-whole-way round New Age gobbelygook nonsense. You cannot predict what will happen and where you will be, unless of course you become a master. Then you can choose. Otherwise, all this New Age idea of choosing is nonsense. You really think people are that powerful if they don’t cultivate, attain the dharmakaya and sambhogakaya. I’m laughing my butt off …. 

Do you want pain  and suffering forever? You only become a master by finding the ultimate one source (that all religions talk about — there is only one and it’s the same thing) and then you are free to come and go as you please, free of pain and suffering, and can help as you wish. That is the ultimate destination. What are you waiting for?

There is no inside of you or outside of you. It is all one thing. There is no inside or outside when you open or close your eyes, or whether it’s this state or that state you experience. There is only one thing going on — a consciousness tableau you are experiencing. But where is the “you” if you are not the transforming body or consciousness to which you identify? All that is being experienced is a limited consciousness, which is a flowing scenery like a river or waterfall or torrent or churning ocean. The flow is not real either since it doesn’t stay. There’s nothing you can grasp on to. But the flow, as a continuity, is not your true self either. Buddha warned you about that. The true self is what stays, what remains, what is pure and clear, blissful, peaceful, eternal, sure. It’s foundational — nothing beyond it, self-so, universal, nothing besides. All sorts of adjectives like that which you find in Judaism, Sufism, etc. but no one gets it. They all want a god, being, person, heaven, etc. but That unmoving one is the eternal forever thing you want to find. It’s always there, still there, always will be but you cover it over hankering after this or that which cannot satisfy you or provide real pleasure and contentment. It’s your TRUE NATURE, not something you make up. You have to reach THAT ONE in spiritual cultivation. We call it awakeneing, enlightenment, realization or liberation.

Think about this, for to realize this is to attain the right view. Also, what is BEHIND the consciousness you experience? What’s behind it? The non-moving one, that’s what is there. In fact, it’s always been there.

When you know that, you can finally relax completely. Awareness is the knowing of consciousness. Awareness is empty, but the content of it is consciousness. Awareness is knowing. Consciousness is what can be known, ie. thoughts, images, discriminations, sensations, feelings, perceptions, etc. Awareness and consciousness are actually one, like a mirror and the reflection within it.

They have to be a unity, there has to be no difference between the two. The reflection lacks substance and reality but it’s there. So who says that there is nothing or annihilation? When the mirror is empty we say extinction but there is the potential for an image or knowing that’s just as valid. The image, or consciousness, doesn’t seem real but it’s real for as long as it lasts which is a moment so brief you must say it’s non-existent. Actually, nothing is really happening. So you can relax because there will always be knowing and contents, i.e. chi or energy and the appearance of  mind. But they’re empty, so why fret so much? Just let go and deal with whatever comes up, and create new good karma in its stead.

So what is the original nature? Everything you read about in the Heart Sutra are the contents of consciousness that are not IT. The five skandhas, your eyes, ears, nose, etc. the linked chain of existence, the Four Noble truths, prajna wisdom understanding, and so on. Even when asleep and you “experience nothing,” you wake up and the continuity of the world is there again. You cannot say you didn’t exist, can you? There was continuity during the time (waking) clear consciousness seemed to be absent. Awareness wasn’t absent. It just didn’t have content, it didn’t have an object you were aware of. So even with the “samadhi of nothingness” in the Formless Realm there is still a foundational state you are not aware of while in that samadhi absorption, and that’s what you are seeking.

Awareness is a function of the original nature. It’s always there and always will be there. It’s simply that the content of awareness — the panorama or movie show — always changes and flows like a river. It’s empty, effervescent, all one thing so nothing is independent. It’s all one show of perfect interdependence. But it’s not one thing because it’s empty of reality, so how can we say a thing is there? Even Vedanta says all this — go read Ramana Maharshi’s  ”Be As You Are “to find out. All the sages tell you the same thing. Get off this Bible thing about a chosen people, we’re saved, someone else has saved us, there is a prophecy, etc. Sorry, the universe goes on forever, no one is chosen, you save yourself and it’s all due to cultivation. Otherwise up and down you go again, bobbing like this through endless states of consciousness transformation forever. The pot of soup never stops boiling, it’s always simmering, it’s always being stireed.

Consciousness could be a visage of the ordinary world, a dream world, deep dreamless sleep, any of the samadhi states. They are not the Tao but things that occupy consciousness, or occupy awareness, however you wish to word it. These are all passing dream states of consciousness that awareness knows. They change, nothing stays still, you cannot hold on to anything, you cannot gain anything in all this. Behind the awareness is something pure, still, unmoving, eternal, immaculate. That’s the original nature. You think you’re doing something but you’re not — it’s just consciousness moving. How to realize this? Anapana. Relax the body, let go of consciousness by knowing the breathing. The rest will happen slowly in time.

So take seeing as an example. When you close your eyes, what you see is darkness. Darkness means black — it’s not the absence of light but a color. You are always seeing colors because AWARENESS sees colors, not light enables you to see, and this means you are always seeing light. All you are ever seeing is colors, or we can say “light” if we want. That’s “seeing the light” cultivation practice (i.e. Mahakasyapa) when you realize that and stay in that state without clinging.

You’ll never be without light in the universe no matter where you go — the visage of what you see is just  colors that change and we attach names and labels to parts of the scenario. So go to heaven, go to the deepest darkest hells and you will never be alone. There will always be light, there will always be energy or chi so we say there is a Buddha everywhere. This is why  the Bible says “God is light”. Wow, they even have it in there. You can’t get rid of it so you can just relax and let go.

With light comes chi, or energy. Chi and light are synonymous. If there is light there is chi and if there is chi there is light. Wherever you go in the universe the mind of awareness is always experiencing light and chi. Now that you know that, you can relax in meditation knowing you’re not going anywhere and will never be alone. It’s just a scenario of consciousness that changes — moving light and energy. Sound, such as used in Kuan Yin’s method of tracing sound back to its source, is energy, too. The real YOU never moves. The scenery, however, all just passes by. You can’t get rid of it so just relax. Don’t hold on to it. It’s changing anyway, so why bother? Pain, pleasure, riches, fame, whatever … they just flow in front of it like an endless river. There’s nothing you can grab onto and hold as real, permanent, lasting, real.

If you can do this and forget the body which is just light and chi, and therefore ignore the body sensations and things you see while practicing anapana, you can enter the first dhyana. Throw all that stuff away and let go of it because it’s not the real you, it’s an illusion that cannot last, it’s not important during your practice session anyway. You don’t need to understand with forced thinking, you just know so let things go naturally. You will focus on the breath which is quasi independent of the rest of the flowing tableau with an independent beat of birth and death, birth and death, in and out, birth and death. It’s quasi independent because breathing always happens. It gives you a way to jump out, something you can focus on within that flow because of its regularity.

Breathing has to go in and out, so it is a way of realizing birth and death and breaking free of following thoughts rather than the sleepy, dreamy way of going along with consciousness we normally get accustomed to. If awareness can detach from the normal tableau because of the knowing of breathing, you can enter into samadhi. Breathing  seems a bit independent because your body just does it rhythmically, and it is involved with the chi of your body as well. You can use that to your advantage to let go and realize the true nature of awareness in that it is separate, independent of consciousness and clear and empty. But you have to come to that realization yourself. Just watch the in and out breath, become filled with chi, ignore all that, and see what happens. Your mind is clear so KNOWING is separate from the chi of breathing. This means that thoughts come and go, come in and then go out like birth and death, Only knowing never moves. Remember that: only knowing never moves. So with this method you can realize prajna emptiness.

Knowing is so clear. Thoughts are temporary things in the mind/consciousness that arise and depart, but the habit pattern of clinging to them and covering over the foundational mind of who you are, what you are is too old to break away from without cultivation practice. Everything you experience in the mind — the whole mental continuum of the five skandhas of feelings, appearances, sounds, colors, etc. are THOUGHTS, images, marks, names and labels. Behind them your true mind is always there. You don’t have to create it, but just discover it once again but letting go of ignorance, ignorant view, and detaching from thoughts that stain it. It is empty from the start. All sentient beings have it from the lowliest worm or microbe to the biggest whale. Humans, ghosts, protect Gods, animals, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas — they are all It. That’s why we say all are Buddhas. It’s all the same thing, the same one thing, so what are you religions fighting over? Certainly not the Tao.  Must be something else. I see no reason for a jihad of killing or “you must follow my master’s way.” Let everything go and you can realize the original nature which is what you are. The jihad is in your own mind, not something you do to someone else. So why be afraid to let go and find out what you are since this is what you are. The only thing that happens is that illusions and ignorance depart, false thinking disappears, mistakes of perception are not made. All the sages of every school tell you the result is peaceful, blissful, “Union,” and if you want to be active and help the world, this is the only true way — for reasons I will not go into.

Just use this understanding to attain samadhi and let go. Don’t argue with it or find fault or punch holes in what I said. You want samadhi? Go along with the ride without too much analysis and practice. Practice, practice, practice anapana. Forget the body knowing you are never missing anything and will never be alone. Awareness will always be there, the true self will always be there, contents will always be there but will simply be changing as they always do. Nothing has changed except your understanding, your knowing of this has transpired which we call “prajna wisdom” or transcendental understanding. Now you can let go and be blissful and free, free of suffering and sorrow and tremendously helpful to other sentient beings.

Whether what I said is right or wrong, don’t argue. Just use this door as an entryway into dhyana. Awareness can learn to separate from the visage of consciousness – the chi feelings in the body and colors you see – and be pure by itself.

Start by practiing anapana. If you can do this and forget the body — which is just light or chi — you can enter into the first dhyana. Just use the technique to attain samadhi by letting go. Forget the body knowing you are the mind, not the bodynor images, colors, lights, appearances you see. Forget the chi (energy) you feel as your body or as movement because chi is alwasy there changing, rolling, trasnforming and is not you either. It’s empty. It’s empty of fixity. It’s empty of non-clinging. Just let go, dioscard everything and know the in breath and out breath through the nostrils. Then the chakras will open but forget this and enter into samadhi.

If you need more instructions, see the sutra articles on anapana and research Rahula’s instructions ont he internet, or the 100 word inscription in Taoism. The world is like a dream so treat it that way and don’t use force. This body is not you, it’s not yours. It’s a waste of life if you don’t practice and if you do practice that you don’t realize your true self. Don’t think that these instructions are so east to come by or that just by reading them youwill understand them. You must practice to truly understand and master a technique. You must prove everything in spiritual cultivation and not settle for dogma, no matter what school, path or religion.

In the Bible there’s the story of Daniel who was thrown in a fire pit and didn’t even get burned. That type of samadhi is illustrated by the Indian yogi in this video whom fire does not burn:

http://www.indiadivine.org/articles/464/1/The-Fire-Yogi-of-Tanjore/Page1.html

This is not the fire samadhi of Arhats, whereupon they can raise themselves into the air and transform their entire body into fire or water. The Tibetan master Gampopa once demonstrated   to a student his ability to sit in samadhi and turn himself into fire using a different fire samadhi (the equivalent water samadhi is mentioned in the Surangama sutra), and demonstration of mastery of the fire and water elements in terms of the “18 transformations of an Arhat” is something that Elijah of the Bible, Ananda and many other masters have illustrated. 

As to the ability to live  a super long life that Shakyamuni Buddha described, and also to keep living without eating  (inedia), this yogi demonstrates these principles:

http://www.indiadivine.org/articles/451/1/Rare-Footage-of-250-Year-Old-Devraha-Baba-in-Vrindavan/Page1.html

By setting his hut above the ground he doesn’t have to deal with people too much or get to close to them physically, something I mention that many masters choose. Inedia is an ability seen in saints of many taditions, including Christianity, because the saint can survive on chi alone due to his stage of cultivation.

To retain a long life this way, Taoism explains that he cannot eat but must keep his intestines clean, and Shakyamuni Buddha in the Surangama sutra explained that there were 10 ways you could accomplish this feat. Shakyamuni even asked four of his students to remain in the world using a particular  technique that is different from this type of dhyana.

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.

Kudos to Nigel Thompson for this report on his 9-bottled wind progress and his gift of a scheduling form (see thelink) so that you can keep track of your practice. Normally people can hold their breath for about 40 seconds at the start and then extend from there, watching the second hand of a clock trying to hold it longer each time while reamining as relaxed as possible. Any muscle tightening defeats the entire practice. If the chi channels are being crimped, how can the chi go through them?

Remember, this is just part of an entire set of preparatory practices, or intensified practices to help prepare you to attain samadhi. The real practice is mind practice via vipassana (cessation-watching/witnessing) or surrender/letting go to reach emptines (ie. done in Christianity or Papaji’s method or Buddhism) or inquiry such as “who am I” … (popularized in Zen, Ramana Maharshi’s favorite, Nisargadatta, etc.). Nigel’s report and the link to his great gift:

Nigel (from Hong Kong) here.  As always thank you very much for your cogent,
practical, no-nonsense, down-to-earth yet comprehensive and cutting-edge
teaching.  The talk this morning (it was morning for me), was, once again,
extremely helpful.  I really appreciate your approach.

I’m writing because I have developed a simple practice log for 365 days of
9-Bottled Wind Breathing practice.  I thought I would send it to you in case
you know anyone else who might benefit from it.

It’s a simple, compact format that I have been finding useful for recording
and keeping track of my times.  I input each of my nine breaths and then do
a strike through on the day and date once the practice is completed.

I’m attaching it to this e-mail.  Hope it’s useful to somebody.

One interesting thing about the nine bottled-wind breathing: I can feel the
effects of it going on in my body for hours afterwards.

Today was the first time that I held my breath for 3 minutes.  And I can
still feel the effects 12 hours later.  Sort of soft squishy feeling around
the center of my chest.  Sometimes I feel a joyful, pleasurable endorphin
kind of sensation 1 or 2 hours later.  During practice I feel sensations in
my upper legs, head, and lower back. … Usually, by about 1:45
seconds my lungs begin to make an expansion-contraction movement of
attempted breathing.   Apart from this I am relatively relaxed, but there is
usually that movement, almost involuntary though sometimes I can relax and
stop it for a while.  I can usually push on for another 40 seconds or so
after that movement begins.  Is that okay? [Answer: yep -- that's how you expand it and lung capacity by about 30%]

The Daily Schedule Practice Sheet

 

The last part of the Surangama Sutra mantra is the key heart of the mantra, and the mantra people recite to help get over sexual desire:

 

e na li

pi she ti

pi la ba she la

two li

pan two pan two ni

ba she la bang ni pan

hu syin du lu yung pan

swo pe he [soha]

Most people know that writing books is not a way to make money today. Their best use today is as a virtual business card to generate leads for higher priced products, which incidentally we don’t sell.

Publishers in the spiritual field have even told me directly that the topic of meditation is at the bottom of the profitability barrel for their book businesses because as one publisher told me, “Meditators tend to be cheap so they don’t buy books.” I laughed, but it’s a true story from someone who published thousands of New Age titles for over two decades. Another publisher friend warned me away from entering the business saying you’ll never make money shipping out paperbacks one by one (he was sick of it), so the ebook solution was born (otherwise you’d never get our materials since regular publishers don’t want to touch them). We still have most all the other costs of book production except the $1.50 or so it costs to put words on paper. So don’t think that just because something is an ebook it cost less to produce it or that it should be free… if that’s the case the other books you buy should all cost about $1.5 as well.  Anyway, we do what we can here to help provide you with superior materials and try to cover our costs to make it all possible.

An individual who recently came into some money, knowing all this and the great value of genuine meditation materials (since you can’t find them out there today), asked to purchase from us 100 copies of Measuring Meditation to be given away to the first 100 people who requested them. Delighted at his request (we disuaded him and made him think about it several times before agreeing), we threw in The White Skeleton Visualization Method to boot.

Because of his generosity, if you are one of the first 100 people responding you can download these books for FREE right now. Yep, a $100 value for free. These are the very same books you buy on the site for green cash. So act quickly because the links won’t work after 100 people download these materials.

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Not more than a few dozen people in the world – at most  – have attained any of the four dhyana, even though they are common stages shaed by all genuine religions. But what about all the others with “spiritual attainments”?

Some are cultivating the du-yin, or shadow side of clear consciousness (shamans, witchdoctors, etc.)

Some are merely psychics…

Some have no attainments whatsoever but cheat people as charlatans would…

Some cultivate one of the pre-first dhyana samadhi. What are they?

* The Desire Realm Samadhi
* The Not Reached Samadhi Samadhi
* The Intermediate (Middle) Samadhi
* The Samadhi That is Similar to Samadhi

When you attaint he state of ching-an, or lightness and peace, you are close to these pre-samadhi samadhi.

Alright, one last review.

Only if you practice the skeleton meditation, mantra and practice merit-making can you, by using tantra, open up the heart chakra using the Vairocana-Zhunti tantra I taught you.

If you open up the heart chakra, you can pass through the conception skandha. Prior to that, you develp the thought born body when you pass through the sensation skandha. If you pass through the volition skandha, you’ll be able to see the root chakra source of life chi which is connected to the tree of life. If you break through the consciousness skandha, you’ll reach a stage of non-production.

If you keep cultivating the body after you pass through the skandhas, you’ll open up and start the River Chariot Rotation. If you keep cultivating, at that point various enlightened beings will come to help you if your vows and merit and behavior are good enough. They’ll test you severely.

With their help, you’ll reach a stage where you no longer cultivate the chakras or chi channels — the body is transformed in such a way as they no longer seem to exist. What do you then cultivate now?

Prajna wisdom and samadhi.

The method to use is prajna or anapana to cultivate prajna. So from now on I don’t want to talk about anything except prajna and real cutlviation. For gong-fu we’re finished. For prajna you have to read the Buddhist sutras or Nagarjuna.

Remember, ALL religions have the dhyana, the four dhayna. The Bible has prophets who cultivated dhyana. Christianity has saints who cultivated dhyana. Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, the Greeks, etc. etc. all have saints and sages who cultivated dhyana. Only Buddhism has prajna wisdom — you don’t cling to dhyana and you don’t cling to emptiness, you don’t cling to conventional existence nor to empty mind. Nagarjuna, who is considered the “second Buddha” (most people don’t know this) explained this best. But dhyana is what most people should cultivate to help attain prajna.

So from now on I’m switching modes as I’ve given enough gong-fu revelations to last a lifetime, and most of it has never been published nor revealed. Soon I’ll be offering monthly lessons on How to Meditate, Tantra, etc. on the website, so that’s where I’m putting my efforts now.

I was watching the following video of the Thousand Hand Kuan Yin (Guan Yin) dance performed by 21 Chinese deaf-mutes. I met the man who trained these dances to make the performance.

Beautiful Kuan Yin Dance Video

Did you know that after you see the Tao, some people leave the world? They don’t want to stay and cultivate the body. Many Zen masters in their thirties did this.

However, if you stay and you cultivate it completely you can gain the sambhogakaya, or purified Reward Body. All your karmic chi, inherited from your parents and your own karmic past, is purified because the chi channels are cleaned out and five elements transformed. You reach their ultimate basis in purity.

The process for attaining the nirmanakya is taught in the Esoteric School. Does that mean that a Jewish practitioner who achieves the Tao will not achieve this? Incorrect. The stage is non-denominational.

However, most people never ever reach this far so it’s not reported in many traditions. Ordinary people cannot believe in thes feats, handle this, or attain this because they don’t cultivate. To really succeed at the level of the sambhogakaya requires lots of merits, wisdom teachings and great teachers. It is said in Taoism that after you open up the River Chariot that heavenly beings will teach you what to do next. Actually, with the thought-born body (born in the sensation skandha) you can receive teachings, but it is the same as before … hints and gesturings without words, and you have to figure out the rest yourself. Part of it is a test to see if you have merits. So only someone who studies A LOT and knows lots of things succeeds. 

Well, what to do next in cultivation after the River Chariot stage involves several tasks:

1. Cultivating samadhi — the dhyana — because now you can easily do so
2. Making vows and improving your behavior, because it’s all about behavior in the end
3. Transforming the physical body and attaining the sambhogakaya
4. Cultivating the Tao, which is not the dhyana

So why does the wonderful video of Guan Yin provoke this little blurb? Because the pictures of 1000 arms and multiple heads you see of Buddhas is a picture of Kuan Yin’s sambhogakaya, or a nirmanakaya based on his sambhogakaya he wants you to be able to see. Maitreya’s looks different. Depending on how you cultivate, everyone’s Reward Body is different. In fact, you can make your chi body at this stage appear in any form you like, but its resting form or appearance is what????

So what is it I want to teach? The fact that in cultivating via Esoteric principles, everyone first pumps out dirty chi from the chi channels. When you succeed in opening the heart chakra and passing through the the conception skandha, it begins in earnest. But if you never get that far it is just like the Fifth Zen Patriarch said to the Sixth: “If you don’t see the Tao, all your cultivation work is in vain.” The real stage of True Cultivation practice starts here.

Some masters just cultivate prajna and see the Tao and then continue prajna cultivation. Sri Nisargadatta, Socrates, and Confucius were of this type. Remember, there are two types of Arhats — those with superpowers (Milarepa) and those without. The second type rarely cultivate the body, just prajna. But this is the easiest and best and most efficient and reliable way to get the Tao. Others cultivate the body, too, and attain the sambhogakaya. If you just focus on cultivating the body (energy / chi /c hakras / chi channels), however, most never succeed. You become trapped out of habit and fixation, clinging to form. You cannot see the Tao that way, or achieve it that way. You need the right view, which you cannot obtain from books but must EXPERIENCE. The right view comes first, so you cultivate empty mind and study dharma teachings to understand.

To succeed you need to cultivate prajna wisdom and directly experience emptiness, and to understand that you need to learn Vedanta and read Buddhist Wisdom Sutras (Heart Sutra, Vimalakirti Sutra, Lotus Sutra, Diamond Sutra, Great Jewel Heap Sutra, Avatamsaka Sutra  etc.). Without this understanding, no one succeeds. That’s why people studying Taoism today never get anywhere, and why Vajrayana practitioners usually study for 20 or more years before being introduced to the high stuff, and even Zen masters spend several years learning Abhidharma, the Sutras and Yogacara. Yogacara is of prime importance if you want to achieve all this, which is why I’m teaching you. Otherwise people who cultivate energy (the body) always cling to form, and they hold this habit for countless lives thinking it’s the way.

After seeing the Tao, many people work on the chakras – root, heart, throat, crown, etc. Of course you have to work on the feet, third eye and countless other chakras and bright points in the body. You reach finer and finer layers of chi, coming upon the thinnest channels you can possibly imagine…so tiny you cannot see them anymore. You push all sorts of dirty chi out of the channel openings and exude it from the body until you get purer and purer and pure and reach finer and finer layers. The methods you can use at the beginning are not the methods you can use as you progress further.

At the earliest stages of practice you push the chi out of the channel opening, or coax it out. You can imagine a metal staff tapping on a metal ground and the chi channels will tend to coaxed out of their holes. Or you can lead out the inside dirty channels using imaginary bright points (globes) at the opening. Or you can try to grab it with a mental net made of chi and pull it out. There are all sorts of methods– at the earliest stage many crude methods will work. The practice takes MONTHS before you get to any finer level.

All the dirty gunk inside chi channels at the earliest stages is gunk; at higher stages the “gunk” is chi channels themselves. Chi channels are always bundles. A channel contains bundles of channels within it and those individuals channels in the bundles are also bundles of channels. The skin of the channels is actually made of a circle of tubes or bundles, too. Hard it is to open all these bundles. On and on you work, trying to do so. This is transforming jing to chi, or cultivating chi, but at the stage of Esoteric Buddhism. If you cultivate emptiness, they’ll unwind also; working on them directly is tantric yoga or Vajrayana.

So what’s so special about the 1000 armed Guan Yin (Kuan Yin, or Avaloketisvara)? The arms. At the stage of breaking through the conception skandha and first opening he heart chakra, it opens in the front to pour out dirty chi. The same for the third eye and throat chakra. You push junk out the front until the sushumna stands and you can push the junk out the roof (crown chakra). Eventually you can clean everything enough to attain the River Chariot Rotation. This takes months after passing through all five skandhas.

When people first start working on the heart chakra after these initial stages, they usually concentrate on opening it upwards (because like the throat, root and crown chakra, it is flat horizontal). But it also opens out backwards through the spine to a very large diameter (and of course to the sides). When you can reach that stage of opening where the back opens, and this is a VERY HIGH LEVEL OF CULTIVATION, the chi channels that come out can be represented as arms, flames, clouds, precious gems, … all sorts of things.

Go look at enlightened being pictures (Buddhas) and you’ll see that. If you want them you can have them, if not you can instantly transformed them into something else.

As to the multiple heads in these Buddha pictures (remember that Budddha does not mean “Buddhism” but enlightened beings),  the crown chakra opens upwards. But it’s not just chi channels pouring out of the head. Above them the channels can bifurcate, and so on and so. It’s up to you. That’s why some Buddhas have multiple heads stacked on each other going upwards. Sometimes there are tiny heads on the top of the skull too, which are the ends of part of the Kamadhenu chakra sticking upwards and other head chakras. I can only tell you; even then to paint the picture (instructions) in words is hard to do. You have to have some gong-fu to understand, otherwise why explain anything at all. Hence most teachers remain silent, but then again, you won’t find this information in the Bible, Talmud, Koran or Book of Mormon. You must feel mercy and compassion for people who do not have the road of high cultivation other than methods for temporary heavenly rebirth.

How do you cultivate to this stage? It’s hard, very difficult. As the Taoists say, heavenly beings usually teach you. But let me give some ideas.

I told you that if you keep using the skeleton method, you can reach the stage of finding nexus points. It’s had to open them … some can be opened by your mind and the chi ejected, but some knot points are so tiny and tight that you can try pulling them out. But this crude method is fatiguing. The skeleton method cultivates your jing because bones are physical (the earth element, the most dense) and made of jing. If you use anapana, you’re cultivating chi trhoughout the limits of your body. If you use the 6th Dalai’s, Mahakasyapa’s and Master Nan’s seeing the light method, you are cultivating shen. But you first see a physical light in the body, make the body light, then switch to the light of  awareness, and then emptiness.

All these practices end up with you reaching emptiness or cultivating emptiness by throwing away from and appearance in the end. You use these practices to the full extent of your body, from the top of the head to the toes and soles of your feet. What a secret I have given you. The basis of the Mahayana and Vajrayana is Hinayana practice to first cultivate the body enough to get some stable gong-fu and cleansing of the chi channels, but the path is Mind-Only. This is just a basis of internal cleansing for preparation, hence the Stage of Intensified Preparatory practices. Don’t think that cultivating the Tao is cultivating the body.

After you open enough of the channels by FULL BODY chi cultivation (via skeleton method, or anapana, or becoming light method that’s a derivative of the seeing the light method), you will reach a stage where previous methods no longer work or the going gets rough. Many methods can be used to progress from this point on. So pay attention  because this is real tantra, real Vajrayana, real Esoteric School, real Yogacara, real Madhyamika, real Shiva yoga. You cannot get this elsewhere.

One of Zhunti’s methods is to imagine a gyroscope turning of chi extending from each nexus knot point. You imagine that it keeps rotating and spinning in all angles until that nexus point opens and the “network” break open.

You can also take a channel, which is a bundle of channels (even the skin of the channel is made of channels), and imagine a string loop pulling them together to a point, or imagine twisting them to a point. [You can never break chi channels so this is safe ...at this stage they are so flexible you cannot destroy them in any way.] When you get that point, imagine taking a loop or piece of the thinnest chi possible chi and slice through that point and they will open, freeing the ends. That will help them unwind.  Imagine slicing through a section over and over again until they unwind. Hours of slicing a point is what sometimes must be done. The Butterfly or Lineman’s loop knot around a chakra or chi channel can be used to slice it until you form your own technique:

http://www.realknots.com/knots/sloops.htm

Where do you do this? Initially at the nexus points. All sorts of chakras and channels you could not previously see will appear because they are so thin and now you’ve reached that stage because of your unwinding. This is also why it’s easier to cultivate the higher samadhi. Prajna cultivation bypasses all this by jumping out of form and experincing the Tao directly. So high, that is the Zen technique and method of Vedanta. Yet the peak of Taoism and Vajrayana is claimed to be Zen, too, so now you know.

Guess what? Here’s the BIG secret… after a time you cultivate the loop cutting method outside the body, too. After you’ve cut all your internal channels and chakras over and over again, they unwind to a stage where this is the next thing to do. The Hell Buddha, Ksitigarbha, tells you to work on the feet, including the toes and feet chakras. Shakyamuni stresses the toes in the skeleton method, starting with the left big toe. So guess where you can start…take Shakyamuni’s hint.

Well, cut the chi you cannot see extending out of the FRONT of the left toe, in front of its tip . Cut it, cut it, cut it and then the net outside of the body will appear. Then do all the toes, other chakras, etc.

nitially you cannot even see that there are strings of chi there, but just keep doing this at this stage and they’ll appear. Do for all the toes…do for the chi exuding out the hole in the skull for the crown chakra … do in front of the third eye … do in FRONT of the heart chakra, do out the back of the spine … do for the throat chakra…do inthe center of the head. Cut every channel you can see internally. Make circles, make spheres everywhere and rotate through the points. All sorts of circular and gyroscopic techniques and loop-cutting techniques and wild unwindings can be used.  The Buddhas will give you hints as to techniques and you just have to keep doing these unwindings. The number of methods is enormous — look at Zhunti’s hands for some clues as to some techniques. A word of advice– this takes ltos of time..might spend days trying to figure out a technique, or days cultivating one section of the body so it loosens. But you laid a Hinayana foundation at the start to make this all easier — the skeleton method, anapana, and seeing the light.

Frankly, this information is too high for most practitioners. Only AFTER The River Chariot stage will it make any sense. Prior to this you can practice splitting open the chi channels and having their bundles of other chi channels fall out, and exuding them from the body.

Cracking the bone chi by flexing it and breaking it is another technique. Letting the earth element dirt fall away from the body’s underlying network structure, waiting for the whole body to dissolve and the root chakra to push the entire body, or just channels, out the top of the head is another occupation. Pushing out the sticky jelly chi, and so on and so on are things you end up doing. There are so many refinement stages to this and so many phenomena that it’s a waste of time to mention other than for you to reach this stage, and then someone teaches you.

Don’t worry about a teacher. If you’re going through the skandhas that kicks this all off, the enlightened beings who take care of this world will know. As soon as you start to free yourself from THAT chi, the whole world trembles and shakes so you will not be missed. But who gets that far? Perhaps a few people each generation. One reason is they did not have the technique.s I’ve been kind and given you nearly EVERYTHING from the beginning.

The 1000-arm stage is so high compared to the stages I just explained   that few reach it because they don’t even know you cultivate the chi backwards, and then cultivate loop cutting of chi channels that don’t even seem to be there because they’re so fine they are invisible. What a network extending EVERYWHERE you will find if you do this. When you experience, you will actually understand that it makes sense. You’ll understand the cosmic tree and all sorts of mysteries.

The body isn’t a body at all…just rolled up chi channels. In fact, it isn’t even that. You are not a body. Imagine that. But thast’s what Shakyamuni Buddha said from the start. You can eventually discover the underlying energy structure of the body and it isn’t even int he shape of a body. Indra’s net, the jeweled net of Indra is a hint.

As your Christmas gift, I’m going to tell you how to open up the chi channels in the foot, one of the most difficult tasks in spiritual cultivation. Most schools that say anything about this also mention how difficult it is.

You can open up the heart chakra through mantra and visualization on a point of focus behind the breastbone, just as I’ve outlined in the Vairocana-Zhunti tantra. You already have that method. It’s cultivating one-pointedness, or samadhi on a point which draws the chi to the point until it pops open. I’ve told you how to do this over and over. But for it to work, you need to loosen up ALL the chi channels ahead of time, and there is no better way than the full body skeleton cultivation method and breathing methods since they affect all channels at once. Plus mantra, of course. We cannot go into this.

You can help open up the throat region and throat chakra starting with the hints given by the Buddha Mahamati. It’s hard to open up this region because of all the glands in the surrounding area. At a later stage, one of Tathagata Vairocana’s techniques is to imagine the throat chakra as changing colors – red, blue, yellow, etc. – to help activate and pull out old chi channels from the region. But this is a stage when the channels you’re working on are extremely thin, and is far beyond the level of “no cut head” at the cultivation level of the skandhas. You need to know both methods if you’re going to do Vajrayana or form practices and want to proceed quickly. It’s not that other methods don’t work. It’s just that I’m trying to shave decades and possibly even aeons off your practice if you want to succeed quickly. You may not believe this but it’s because you just don’t know how kind I’m being.

After countless purifications of the five elements and further opening up the channels, you can arrive at the initialization of the River Chariot rotation, which is the “macrocosmic circulation” of Taoism. But the Tao school isn’t the only school that talks about this stage. Buddhism has it, the Esoteric school has it, tantric yoga has it, … and as I showed analyzing the “Song of Songs” from the Old Testament, even the Bible has it. It’s a non-denominational state of cultivation. You’ve got to get over this idea “my tradition is best” or “mine is so high” or “only this school has this ” because frankly it’s all nonsense. These are all the non-denominational stages of physical gong-fu I’m talking about, It’s all science. I’m being kind to link these schools and the stages for you so you’re no longer confused. All the religions can access the four dhyana, and these are the physical states of gong-fu on the way to the dhyana. The dhyana are common achievements but as for the wisdom achievements that get you the Tao, that’s another story for another day. Only Buddhism, Zen and Vedanta approach it with very clear teachings. What differentiates Buddhism fromt he rest of the spiritual schools is prajna wisdom, and perhaps one day we can get to it and Zen.

Now opening up the feet chakras and chi channels is particularly difficult. One of the respectful names for a Buddha, or fully enlightened one, refers to the fact he has opened up the chakras and chi channels in the bottom of the foot. To be given a name just for this feat alone should tell you it’s extremely difficult, so I’m giving you a big heads up. You won’t find this information elsewhere, not anywhere. It’s due to the kindness of Ksitigarbha Buddha that we have it, so I pass it on to you. How can you pay him back? You cannot since he’s helping you cut off several aeons of cultivation effort. If you think you can just go buy this information in a bookstore, your head is in the clouds. It’s only out of kindness and mercy that’s it’s provided. Such good fortune must be paid for – Buddhas don’t even teach this publicly or privately because the cost is so high, so you usually have to figure it out from their hints. That’s how difficult this is and how important and valuable it is. You cannot succeed without merit.

But before I tell you the technique, we must remember that Taoism says you must breath from the bottom of your feet. Some Tao school books specifically mention your heels. Both are correct, and other cultivation schools say similar things. Why do they all say this? Because the stage is non-denominational.

These schools are referring to the fact that when you open the large macrocosmic River chariot rotation of the tu-mai, jen-mai, sushumna and feet channels, etc. you open up the channels enough so that you can find a pump in the heels of the foot that help push the chi back upwards after it descends from the root chakra perineum to the toes.

Remember that at the initial stages of cultivation (where you’re probably at), when you have extra energy you try to run it lightly down the insides of the legs to the toes to open that channel, and when weak you lightly draw it upwards through those acupuncture meridians. This stage is so far beyond that but for a lucky person who works hard to get to the River Chariot Rotation these following instructions are worth more than gold. When those inner leg channels open, you usually will have sinus problems for awhile. But remember again that there’s “open” and then there’s “OPEN” — there are many stages to the “opening” process because the large diameter chi channels are filled with many diameters of smaller chi channels made of more subtle chi which you cannot yet see. You “open” the gross level first before you can find and then “OPEN” the finer levels. So what I’m going to tell you is several stages past the River Chariot rotation, and most Taoist “successes” never find this…

In Buddhism this is all summarized by the phrase “purifying the five elements” so you can get a glimpse of how high Buddhist cultivation is when you realize it doesn’t focus on this stuff because it’s all low level. It’s still just cultivating form rather than prajna, so in one respect you can say this is inocrrect or not the right road. But if you say you are transforming the Reward body, you’re a bit on track BUT ONLY if you understand the wisdom way and have read a lot of wisdom sutras (the Diamond Sutra, Vimalakirit Sutra, Lotus Sutra, …) so your view is correct. If your view is correct then you can eat a bit of poison, but if it isn’t correct you will die along this route and achieve nothing.

Once you get to the River Chariot rotation, how do you proceed further? Breathing practices — in particular anapana. I gave you an entire teaching on this in the “Anapanasati” sutra article. Read it again. Even Confucianism reaches this stage of achievement because Mencius talked about it, which I showed. Why? To you it’s high, but it’s form cultivation so it’s low. In the absolute sense this is garbage, and yet this is the gong-fu foundational basis for stable attainment. Don’t attach. Treat it in the right manner…

Anapana is one of the top methods of the Zen school at this stage for increasing your gong-fu. That’s a big secret no one will tell you – you owe Master Nan Huai-Chin for that pointer. The Zens chool uses anapan even after the great breakthrough. You sit and fill yourself with chi, letting go and observing the process. Let it fill everywhere — there are no barriers in the body and no boundaries to the body — the body has no barriers but is just chi, so it has no boundaries. You are not the body anyway. This is cardinal principle number one in Buddhism, but now you’re getting there where you can stay in that realization for long periods of time. Congratulations. Anyway, anapana is how to you cultivate.

People who continually cultivate anapana can achieve rainbow bodies at death, or their bodies will slowly shrink to nothingness over a week as they die. You already have the method. Another thing they can do is predict the date and time of their death because of their breathing practice. Both these phenomena have been seen by many people in many schools, so there is no reason to go into them.

There’s yet another way besides anapana, and here’s the secret. You need a lot of blessings to be able to do this tantric means and it will use up a lot of energy and concentration as well, but is extremely quick.

You first start focusing on the large squarish heel pumps, which look like they’re cubes in shape. Are they really cubes? Not really, but that’s the general appearance when you start. Later you’ll see what they are after they disintegrate or shrink or transform, however you want to word it.

Just as the root chakra furnace looks squarish, and the furnaces beneath the other chakras look like little cubes, soon you find out why. The heel pump at the level of the macrocosmic circulation, or River Chariot rotation, appears cubish itself. So what you do is first THINK.

Cultivation always requires clear thought, wisdom principles and logic. It’s science all the way through, nothing mysterious or mystical or supernatural. But of course you need merit to succeed. Merit is something you might deem mystical but that’s because you cannot yet fathom the workings of interdependent origination. That’s why I wrote “White Fat Cow” for changing your fortune and destiny, but most people still don’t get it.

Thinking as to what to do, you realize you usually push the impure chi out the toes, or the center of the foot chakras. So in this case, it makes sense for you to focus on the bottom of the heel pump cubes and try to push out any junk from within them. The junk includes levels of impure chi and thinner and thinner chi channel networks and bundles that are embedded in layers of each other. Unless you get there you won’t understand. At the gross level it just looks like a chi flame when junk is exuding but at higher and higher stages of cultivation you can see micro thin chi channels bundled together and layered within each other or connected in a small network. But we won’t go into this. All I can say is that to get to the ultimate layer you’re always purifying these coarser layers.

So how do you open the heel chakra pumps? You can imagine a white circle in the center of the cube, and then try to push out the chi which is similar to methods you may have used to get to this stage if you used tantric yoga or Vajrayana, Yogacara methods. These are all form school methods as are most of the methods in Judaism, Taoism, Bon, western alchemy, nei-gong, etc. You imagine a white circle (the protruding top of the old impure chi) and imagine a shining silver ball or sphere about an inch or so in front of the opening, and thereby pull it out using that bright source of yang.

Yang attracts yin – it’s a universal principle of science – so you should understand this method of pulling out impure (yin) chi by attraction. You imagine a bright, silvery flame, circle, Buddha, whatever … in front of chi channel opening and the yin chi will be attracted to it and try to squeeze out the channel, at which point it’s on it’s way out. In this case you imagine a silvery globe, flower, ball or whatever beneath the foot underneath the heel pump center to attract out the impure chi. You might imagine a flame exuding out the bottom of the cube to get it started as well. Those are all similar techniques based on the same principles. It’s science from beginning to end, but you need instructions for how to do it. THINK carefully and you can create your own.

Okay, if you do that with enough concentration the heel chakra pump will eventually empty out and open up. Guess what happens next? The SURPRISING thing is that it will actually get smaller in size as you pull out more and more layers (diameters or tubes) of chi. When you pull out enough of them (and this takes hours at this stage of practice– this is certainly nothing a beginner can accomplish), the cube will shrink in size until it becomes a small cubic nugget. How much will it shrink? Big surprise! Until it’s a tiny cube!

We’re talking about an inch becoming less than a quarter or eighth of an inch or smaller. This is what’s hidden within the foot pump but you never knew it. It’s not so much it shrinks but that the untransformed inner layers are revealed after you transform or purify the outer layers by eliminating the old garbage impure chi at the nexus points. That’s the process of tantric yoga. The old coverings drop away and the inner layers revealed, but at this stage all the flesh is gone and only the sparse network remains.

“But wait, there’s more….”

If you reach that stage, then on the left and right sides of the foot small cubes will then similarly suddenly appear. Surprise! They are hidden until you purify out the chi to this level and get rid of it by pulling it out the foot heel chakra. Then this new level of superstructure underneath can appear … it’s the superstructure left and who knows what’s beneath this level once you purify it? You’ll have to go even further beyond this level of transformation to find out. I can only take you so far.

If you can empty these little cubes (connected by thin channels the width of extremely thin wires) out, then more and more will appear making up the infrastructure net of the foot. One after another they appear as others are transformed – they don’t all appear at once because you haven’t purifed enough chi for this to happen. A netowrk of channels has to be pulled out for the connected cubes to become visible.

This is surprising. It’s a stage well beyond the appearance of the foot channel, but still very rudimentary or coarse. Now you have to open up all these tiny cubes (which just look like cubes but aren’t). How do you do that?

First the procession, then the method.

You work on the heel, then on other new cubes that appear on the inside of the foot and on the outside. They’ll slowly appear as more and more of them are purified. They do not all appear at once. As you purify one, then another and then another appears to slowly reveal the hidden infrastructure. You do both sides of the foot (several will appear) and then the ones in the center of the foot in the center of those chakras will finally appear last. That’s the progression. They’re hidden until you reach this stage of refinement. It takes houirs to work on them and once started don’t stop for fear you’ll lose this stage and have to do too much preparatory work again to reclaim it.

Now the method. The idea of creating a flame out of the cubes to pull out the old impure channels works, but not too well. It’s exhausting. The idea of squeezing them out that you may have used previously is exhausting, too. The idea of leading them out using silvery yang globes is also exhausting and verrrrrrry slow at this sper refined stage. All these forceful methods are exhausting and slow and not as reliable as the following quick technique.

One method works best. Pay attention! This is the method of the Buddha Ksitigarbha I’m teaching you, an enlightened being who has devoted himself to purifying all the hells. Ksitigarbha, I bow to you and salute you because none of us are as great as you. Ksitigarbha Buddha has vowed, “If hell is not yet empty, I vow not to become a Buddha” and you can find his story in the “Sutra of the Past Vows of Earth Store Bodhisattva” available on amazon.com.

Sutra of the Past Vows of the Earth Store Bodhisattva

http://www.sinc.sunysb.edu/clubs/buddhism/ksitigarbha/content.html

All of us want to go to the Heavens, and none of us want to go to the Hells to help the beings there. But if we don’t open up our foot chi channels, we haven’t gotten rid any large chunk of our own Hell karma. That’s one reason you sit with cross legs, which is to try to open up the chi channels in the legs, and the pain you bear helps burn up bad karma as well as force the channels to open. Two birds with one stone, but ordinary people don’t realize the deep wisdom behind all these things. I’m spilling the beans and all the secrets so you can get a small glimpse and comprehend. I really dislike talking about gong-fu but no one will listen to wsidom teachings or wisdom sutras. Everyone thinks they are beyond that and understands. I just laugh….

On the site I’ve also taught you how to make nightly offerings to the hungry ghosts for some merit, and if you want to succeed at opening the feet you must perform this nightly two minute offering and recite sutras or mantras for ghosts and hell beings. Frankly you need merit. You hate to hear it but if you already had enough merit you would have already succeeded.

But on to the method …

Which portion of the human body corresponds to the hells? As you know from “Tao and Longevity,” from the navel downwards corresponds to the Desire Realm. Ghosts are rarely seen having feet because they cannot open up the foot channels. Devils are seen with cloven feet to remind us that the feet are dead or yin for those who are evil and do not cultivate virtue. The bottom of the foot is the most extreme yin place of the body, corresponding to the hells. If you can open up the feet, not only can you become a Taoist Immortal who lives a long life, but most of all save the hell beings in your own body. Some people who achieve this can learn how to fly like Milarepa or the Taoist Immortal Lu.

What is the Buddha Ksitigarbha’s method for opening up these cubes that are interconnected by wire thin channels dotting the superstructure of the foot? Ksitigarbha Tathagata, who always appears as monk, carries a staff. Imagine the impact of a metal staff hitting the ground: bang, bang, bang. With each jolt, the tiny chi channels within the centers of the cube will tap a bit out, and it you keep jostling them this way with the taps, you will be able to push out yet a thinner/tinier degree of chi channels and empty out these nexus points. So you imagine the tapping of the staff on the ground, while focusing on the cubes, and with each tap the center junk can jostle out a bit.

That’s the basic method and it works far, far better than anything else you can create, even twirling the chi and so forth. At the minimum you owe quite a few bows to Ksitigarbha just for hearing about this, let alone practicing it. And recite the Diamond Sutra for the ghosts with a offering tonight because it will help them.

What’s next? If you so that for the entire foot, which takes hours and hours, eventually the entire body drops away except for this superstructure of squares and channels that has been there all along hidden. This superstructure or net surrounds the chi of flesh. It’s very “sparse” in that the nexus cubes are very far apart in most places. Amazing that this is revealed. You can find the wire net structure of chi channels and cubic intersections that forms the outer structure of the human body. I’m not going to explain more. You’ll have to keep cultivating to find the next stage beyond this, too.

Congratulations. You’ve just realized a stage far beyond what you normally read about in Taoism or in the Esoteric School. Tibetan monks don’t have anything on you because they don’t have these teachings. They achieve the stage, like evryone else, but there are no teachings on this. Neither do the Jewish, Christians, Moslems, Sikhs, Mormons, Pagans, Western Alchemists, and so forth have any such gong-fu teachings. If you can get there and use this you owe 10,000 prostrations to Ksitigarbha Tathagata who doesn’t care about your prostrations or kow-tows, but knows that if you want help for success at this stage then you need both merit and a karmic connection. Many enlightened masters of the past would go around asking people for a single coin in order to establish a karmic connection for the future. Maitreya, as the Venerable Master Budai, is just one of the many masters who used to do this. Master Budai’s eulogy read:

“Just as this cloth sack confuses many men,
He begs from whomever he meets. Whatever for?
Whenever he meets a test, there’s nothing you can do.
Don’t miss the chance; he is the future Buddha!”

Oh yes, I forgot to say this is a good time to try to cultivate and succeed in the fire samadhi for your entire body. And that when you are using the White Skeleton meditation (visualization) method to transform your foot bones (starting with your big left toe), you can rotate the chi this way and that in the foot, especially from within and around the bones, and use Ksitigarbha’s mantra “Om Pra Ma Ni Da Ni Soha.” This will go a long way to helping transform them and prepare for the higher stages of the path, plus other marvelous untold benefits.

Tantric cultivation like this is just a process, but don’t think it’s so easy. Without merit you absolutely cannot succeed. Without instructions you cannot succeed either. You can read all you want and practice, practice, practice but you cannot succeed without enough cultivation merit. Even with merit and instructions, without a good teacher you cannot succeed. Without the help of other enlightened beings you cannot succeed either, which is why I always tell you to establish a karmic connection. But at least I’ve told you more than you’ll ever find anywhere else. Don’t say I’m not merciful. Good luck.

When you open up the heart chakra and pass through the conception skandha, just as Buddha said the enlightened beings will come and anoint your forehead. But if you can crack open these little nexus points, many more Buddhas will gather round in excitement to watch because it is so hard to do this and so rare to have someone find them. It’s big excitement on their side if someone can reach this stage of transforming the physical body. It’s just body transformation, not enlightenment.

I try to be kind, so here are some methods you should remember:

Sometimes you use the method of Ksitigarbha’s staff banging the ground to jostle the dirty chi channels out of them. Other times you can image the sound of a metal hammer striking an anvil, and use the sound to jostle them out. One Buddha taught that you can use a long feather to tickle them out rather than use force, in which case you try to go to their root source and tickle that so it lets go and they loosen from their connection point within the larger framework.

Zhunti Buddha teaches that sometimes you can rotate and spin the channels inside, to twirl the garbage channels within the larger tubes. What you do is grab one of the innermost nexus points and keep twisting it, and then enlargen its parent diameter to pull it out along with the chi channels connected with it. Or you can grab an inner nexus point and slooooowly pull it while rotating it in a wide circle of the width of the chakra (while pulling it at a 45 degree angle to the surface of the chakra) until all the useless channels it’s connected to are pulled off and fall down; the weight will cause them to open up the other nets so that all the garbage falls through. Zhunti is extremely smart and wise. I bow to you, Zhunti Tathagata, and pass on your technique.

Remember that with your mind you can expand the diameter of the ends of the channels, but if you reach a channel whose mouth you cannot open that way with your mind (because the nexus point is too tight), you’ve reached the level you should grab and pull out. What a big secret I’ve revealed that will save you how much TIME and ENERGY and EFFORT at this stage. The advice is invaluable … I’m sorry I but I have to say it. For instance, the Tibet school always says you should cultivate the bright points and bindus, but they never tell you how. Surprise! Now you know many ways to do it.

It’s so hard to empty out the channels (Shakyamuni Buddha just called it purifying the four elements) so you have to use many different methods because the old methods of generating bright points at chi channel openings to attract out the dirty chi doesn’t work well at this stage. So at other times you grab the nexus points from their centers and keep pulling out the long strings of garbage chi channels and the garbage chi and connected chi channel network connected with them. Within each nexus point there is another and another and another and so on made of thinner and thinner and thinner chi channels. They only become revealed when you somewhat empty out the larger diameter. The more you empty out, the more nexus points are revealed.

Each level you go through purifies another layer of chi. The smaller the center you can grab, the more you can pull out. For instance, when you see a bit of white chi protrude from the channel, you can use your mind (mind and chi are linked) to enlargen that chi channel’s opening, go into the white paste chi and grab any tiny nexus point deep within in and then use it to pull out the garbage using that anchor point. So in other words, you’re going one level thinner/tinier and pulling it out the larger diameter which you make wider through the efforts of mind.

I suggest you first work on the foot — all the foot chakras, and then you can eventually get to the crown chakra, throat chakra and heart chakra points which won’t appear until you’ve done a lot of work to pull out the old gross channel widths. It is incredibly difficult to find these little points and extremely difficult to cultivate them.

If you can do this and eventually get to the level of finding twisted chi channels, and reach the stage of the “powdered” charcoal chi coming out (which is akin to the stage of Blackness when you pass through the conception skandha when first opening the heart chakra), and go past the stage of flourescent blue, then you have really done something and made some progress. Usually it takes a few aeons to cultivate the chi channels this thin and clear them out. What first seems like a cube is eventually clarified to reveal a polygonal shaped nexus pulled by chi channels at its corners (it’s hard to see which shape it actually is because they’re so small), within which the center is a empty circle and within that empty center, attached to the corners through wire thin chi channels connected to its parent outsider is yet another polygonal shape, and so on and so on. Tinier and tiner they get. You’ll have to cultivate yourself to find out what the actual shape is for yourself.

The width (thinness) of the chi channels at these stages is so very thin so even calling them wires brings up too large a connotation of imagery. Every time you empty out one larger layer by pulling out all the garbage within its diameter, newer thinner layers appear that were previously hidden by all the gook. Guess what? You have to purify all of them to attain a Reward body (sambhogakaya) and transform your karmic inheritance. Vow to become a Buddha, a fully enlightened being, and do this.

Cultivating gong-fu is just yoga pracice, a process with steps one, two, three. But if you want the Tao beyond samadhi you need to read Buddhism and Vedanta (not Tibetan Buddhism or Taoist circulation yogas, kaballah, etc.) and read the wisdom sutras like the Diamond Sutra, Lotus Sutra, Vimalakirti Sutra, Heart Sutra, Prajnaparamita Sutras, Complete Enlightenment Sutra, Sutra of the Earth Store Bodhisattva, Nirvana Sutra, Amitofo Visualization Sutra, Surangama Sutra, Lankavatara Sutra, Lion’s Roar of Queen Srimala, Altar Sutra, Great Jewel Heap Sutra, Flower Ornament (Avatamsaka) Sutra, Anapanasati Sutra, Medicine Master Sutra, Sutra of 42 Sections, the Sandhinirmocana Shastra (Thomas Cleary translation) and so forth.

If you don’t read these sutras and practice prajna wisdom, there’s no way you can succeed just by doing yoga. Reading Ramana Maharshi and Sri Nisargadatta will help a lot, as will Three Texts on Consciousness Only (Numata Institute) and The Awakening of Faith (Avagosha).

I used to argue with my teacher - formally recognized as an “enlightened” Esoteric school master by the Hutuku – that Tibetan Buddhism teachings were so high and he used to tell me they were the low stuff. But he was right, he was right yet people don’t believe it because they don’t have enough gong-fu and wisdom to know. What I’m teaching you is far beyond what they normally teach gong-fu wise and yet it is still all very low level. So good luck and remember the process….and if you want it in a subsequent life then spread it around. That’s your job to disseminate useful cultivation methods widely if you want the dharma in the future.

If you speak Chinese, here are the AV recordings of a Zen retreat Master Nan did in Xiamen, China several years back. They are posted on the web for you to enjoy:

http://www.buddhist.idv.tw/a14.htm

The full Chinese transcripts are available at:

http://www.buddhist.idv.tw/A14/text.doc

No, it’s not in English. He only speaks Chinese.

At the next stage, the heart chakra sprouts wings, they’re so wide. As they flap they pump, it’s an unexpected delight. Later they pin down in the chest cavity just as was done in the lower cavity for the root chakra furnace. This is the next stage of development as the River Chariot evolution proceeds further. It mirrors what happened previously to the root chakra in the lower belly. Now the dirty chi collects as a white ball of half vapor, half solid like cotton or cotton candy. It is transforming into real chi, the stage of jing transforming to chi. The perineum opens up and it’s pushed out like a bombardier. This is an exit point which rarely spontaneously occurs.

 

The wings of the heart chakra, the opening of the perineum to discard the impure chi below, this is all indicating that you are starting to cultivate the Realm of Form and the four dhyana. Remember that from the root chakra to the heart chakra represents the Realm of Desire, but from the heart chakra to the brow represents the Realm of Form. As the “heart has sprouted wings,” you are now ready to enter into dhyana.

 

If you can establish the linkage to the crown flower bud in the center of the head, the heart chakra will turn yellow and orange, or sometimes a bit of red, and this is it’s own stage of the furnace. So the heart chakra develops its own stage of the furnace too. The base, a square, will form and then rise up to the crown to establish the left and right channels…At this stage the chi at the crown is called “brilliant.”

 

Yellow and gold colors will sometimes flood the upper cavity from the heart chakra upwards. The brow chakra (third eye) becomes enflamed as a circle of silver chi and you can use it as an exit point to push the chi that’s being cooked out the chi channels. All you want is the microcosmic circulation again and to empty the channels of this impure, untransformed chi.

 

The chi at this stage is hard to move using force or intentt. Only by cultivating emptiness can it start to move.

 

The chi is white and the body is hot at this stage. The root chakra is cooking the chi, and the temperature of your body will rise significantly. This is like the prayoga stage of “Heat” or “Warming” within the Stage of Intensified Practices, for Buddhism has noted you are ready to cultivate dhyana. So you progressed through the Intensified Practices, then Stage of Seeing the Tao, then True Cultivation Practice, and now you’re back again. So you’re at a point where you can cultivate true samadhi. You can call this true cultivation practice, or the intensified practices. Actually, it’s the intensified practices. You’ve made one big loop.

 

The channels running down the insides of the two legs open up to a yet greater extent, and now your sinuses will start acting up and you will be secreting snot (nasal discharge) almost constantly. Don’t worry if you get sick at this stage. Sometimes you have to get sick to make progress in cultivation. Just arrange yourself and your body accoding to conditions and keep cultivating. Don’t lose your semen.

 

If you keep going, and try to cultivate the formless absorptions, the crown chakra loop or bud at the top of the head (inside it, near the top of the roof, just underneath it) will form a small flap of wings on the left and right sides, too, just as was done before for the root and then heart chakra. And then it will eventually stand upright and then poke through or protrude through the top of the skull. At this stage you can be called an “Iron Bell Head” because you can still feel the bone chi in the head, which feels like an ion bell, but the bell handle is a little set of chi channel loops from the forming crown chakra. This is why pictures show Buddhas with topknots at the centers of their head. You can achieve this stage, too, you just have to cultivate.

 

This protrusion means that you’ve opened the Brahmarandra chakra hole in Indian yoga and Hinduism. You can actually see the etheric hole in your skull. If you want to be reborn in a higher heaven after death than where people usually go, then you can now do so after achieving this stage.

 

Properly this stage belongs to the Hindu schools of Indian yoga but once again, as you can see all the cultivation schools have it. Tibetan Buddhism has it because they borrowed many tantric teachings from India. Chinese Taoism has it because it is the Baihui location that opens up – a small hole less than a quarter of an inch wide opens and the loop protrudes out here, like the looped handles of a bell. Buddhism has it because all Buddhas are shown with top knots. But Buddhism doesn’t use this chakra for exiting the body – Buddhas and Bodhisattvas always use the buddhra-randhra behind it. Always. Please remember this most excellent, jewel encrusted, supreme of all teachings. The buddha-randhra chakra at the back part of the top of the head, behind the brahmarandhra, and is the key to complete Buddhahood.

 

If you cultivate you get this stage but if you don’t cultivate you don’t. How do you cultivate? You let go of thoughts, you rest the mind, you cultivate emptiness. How is that denominational? You’re kidding yourself if you thought your religion had some special promise that won you some reward because of belief, membership, ritual or worship. Everything depends upon your own personal cultivation, and nothing else, except the additional fact you need virtue and merit to succeed or for others to help you. No one can succeed without merit, no one can receive help with merit. No one can even receive or hear about teachings without merit. That’s how critical merit is.

 

Next a loop of chi channels will then protrude out of the third eye orifice. Then, the throat chakra will transform, and then the left and right channels in the head will assume a new shape and hug its sides instead of going straight up. This shape change is a big secret that people may use to cheat you. A loop will then protrude out the buddhra-randhra chakra on the back of the head, which is more difficult to open than the crown brahmarandra. Remember the teaching – it is a supreme teaching to forget the yogi brahmarandhra and always use the Buddha-randhra when exiting the body. Why would you come all this way and ignore the teachings of a supreme yogi sage Shakyamuni?

 

Next the heart chakra central hole develops its own loop protrusion. Eventually, you can push the little loops out of all the chakra openings as well as toes, feet and other orifices.

 

Remember that this is the initial goal of ALL the yoga schools in India since Shiva the Great Yogi – I Salute You Oh Great One. Now don’t get me wrong and think I’m saying Shiva is just about yoga and gong-fu. I cannot stand the number of people who try to twist what I say intot what they personally think. The schools of yoga are about abandoning the ego and reaching enlightenment, but they emphasize form practices as their road to get physical gong-fu which you pass through for attainment. Hatha yoga, Raja yoga, Kundalini Yoga, Laya Yoga, Mantra Yoga, etc. all want you to reach these stages. Yes, we’ve just been talking about yoga, but I did  it in a different way than you’re used to and filled in all the details that people look for in secret texts. In the literature you’d be hard pressed to find anything along the lines of what I’ve just taught you out of kindness. But there’s no secret – it just takes practice. Regardless, the entire culture of India is built up around just this.

 

If you cultivate Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras or the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, this is the initiatory stage you want to accomplish, so pay attention to how you get here. Yogananada, Muktananda and all the others try to reach this stage. Now you see how to link it with Taoism and the cultivation of jing to chi, and the cultivation of the dhyana in Buddhism, as well as the Esoteric school. But if you think that Sufis who cultivate don’t reach this, or Christians, or Jews or Sikhs, Jains or others then you’re wrong. But where you go from here is where a lot of all these people make mistakes. Even the Arhat yogis, who reach the nirvana with remainder, walked out of Buddha’s Lotus Sutra lecture because they didn’t believe there was a stage higher than what they had achieved. Five hundred of them!

 

Unfortunately, if someone explained the road to Tao by speaking in the way of Confucius or Socrates, people would just ignore him or worse, even spit on the speaker! This world of modern science only understands materialism and respects only money. Hence the explanations of spiritual cultivation need to be re-given in terms of the Esoteric school descriptions to wake these people up. It’s actually a terrible pollution, but it does help you to understand how the schools link. How I wish for someone who could understand Zen, but for that there is no audience. You must remember that Shakyamuni cultivated all this gong-fu and the nine Samadhi, but gave them up because they were not the Tao. How supreme, how supreme. This is all just the low level crap.

 

You didn’t ask why the left and right channels bow out inside the head to hug the left and right sides. Because a large disk forms in the center of the head which will soon push out the top – the thousand petal chakra disk and its leaves. The chakra leaves can now push out and unfold. All this work for just this small attainment. But then again, is it that small an attainment?

 

The next stages of the chi transformations are called “lightness,” then “invisible,” then “formless.” If you cultivate correctly without clinging, and practice your anapana properly, you’ll pass through these stages quickly. The next stage is called ”clear perception.”

 

At this point, this is the true chi you’re finally cultivating. This is the stage of finally cultivating the chi of the human body. Previously we called the stuff inside the channels “chi,” but it was really akin to jing whereas this is the real wind element, or chi, or prana. Now  you’ve reached real chi and are within the reach of the second to third dhyana if you can cultivate correctly.

 

By now you should realize that the chi channels are like flexible plastic tubes, just like you’d find on a fish aquarium pump. They are ALWAYS clogged 100% solid all the way through with gunk. Call it jing, chi, jing-chi, the five elements, impure paste, the untransformed body, whatever … the diameters are always clogged with this. They are long tubes clogged with paste.

 

By opening the channels it means you’re pushing all of this out, and the heat of the cultivation warms it so that it can slide out easily like paste from a tube. How do you do that? By blazing the chakra pumps, by shining awareness on them. That’s a tantric yoga method, or Taoist method, or Esoteric school method.  That’s how you can get it to unstuck and move. Or, you can just let go by practicing anapana and it’ll just happen. Or, you can just cultivate mind-only, by letting go and cultivating emptiness, and it’ll happen naturally. The tantric way is the hard way. It only lets you know  these useless details, and if you go doen this path, the chances are you’ll never get anywhere.. That is the history of all the form schools.

 

At these early stages of spiritual cultivation this material still has a liquid-element to it, even if it’s hardened like stone. Thus it is akin to jing and the water element as well as hormones. Much later you’ll see tiny white drops or diamondlike crystals exiting out the chakra centers and running through the orbits of the channels, too, right through their centers, but not at this stage yet.

 

If you can clean out all the channels to a very high stage, and get through all these many many layers I’ve described, then you can become a Once-More-to-Return (Sakadagami), Sotapanna (no more than seven more successive human rebirths) or Anagami as Buddha said. Those are individuals who reached a certain stage of clearing, or excellence, and then stopped, but have yet to finish the whole. Gosh, where are you going to find out these things as to how many times it takes? In the Bible? Don’t make me laugh.

 

If you can clear everything out to a very high stage, and do some other things as well such as virtues, merits, vows, excellences, mental purity and commitments which we can’t go into, then you can reach the 8^th Stage Bodhisattva bhumi which means in every life you’ll be able to get the Tao. You’ll reach a point that, because of your cultivation it will just be easier to cultivate each time you return, and thus your chances of success will be more assured. You can choose any religion to be born into to help them lift themselves  up, but you’ll go through same process all the same. That’s why the same fellows keep coming back over and over again, wearing different hats, to help people, yet humanity doesn’t know it.  Cultivate awakening to your original nature directly, by cultivating prajna wisdom, and this all happens naturally.  I’m just being stupid bothering to let you know the esoteric details of some of the physical transformations. Don’t equate the high high Bodhisattva bhumis with this low level crap. But also, don’t say they aren’t related or that there is no connection.

 

And so now you know a bit behind the Bodhisattva bhumi explanations within Shakyamuni Buddha’s teachings, but unfortunately I had to speak of it in terms of tantra instead of his fine fine way which is much better. This was just to help make you understand and make his road that much clearer. People don’t study, so they really cannot appreciate how well he put everything together. They think they can pick up a few books, look for a secret method here or there, and that’s it. Hardly. All this information I’m telling you is precious, and yet useless to you if you don’t cultivate.

 

Now the real sushumna channel, thinner than the thinnest hairs or wires you can possibly imagine, so thin it seems intermittent, so thin it’s almost non-existent, will appear. At first from only the heart region upwards, later from the root base all the way to the roof. Only with a great enlightenment vow can you open it up to help save ALL sentient beings. “Oh, I just want to be a Taoist Immortal.” “I just found a new kabbalah secret.” “Oh, I want to be a yogi and be free from society.” “I want an immortal sword and to be able to fly through the air.” Yeah, right. Idiots.

 

Previously you were working on the larger outer layers wrapping the sushumna and would generate a bright spot at the center of the heart chakra, and then lead the chi upwards to the silverish shining crown chakra in the center of the head, and then let the River Chariot rotation carry it down the jen-mai and to the feet and up again to the tu-mai. Eventually you would push this chi out of the body after it revolved a bit.  Always you repeated the process over and over again, always trying to keep the heart chakra cooking,” shining with a brilliant silver brighter than the sun. But now you’re reaching the innermost layers of the sushumna, rather than the larger diameter outer layers, and there is a subtle relationship here with opening it and attainments up to the Bodhisattva bhumis. Stages such as “Immovable” or “Invincible” become a tiny bit

 

I forgot to tell you that  the  stage of chi cultivation prior to the appearance of the real sushumna is called “mirror shine” because of the crown chakra’s shining.

 

Oh and by the way, the real tu-mai and jen-mai within the larger diameter tu-mai and jen-mai channels are also so thin. So many secrets come out that I’m telling you. Secrets within secrets. Ha ha ha.

 

These are instructions only given to Bodhisattvas. How lucky you are, how lucky you are!

 

The sacrum tail bone channels transform at this stage to something even greater than before. Finally those stubborn bastards! – it takes forever to open them up to their true stage. Shakyamuni and Manjushri had problems with their lower backs, but Dipankara’s problem was with the right thigh bone. The next Buddha’s problems will probably be in the shoulders, but the first in line for this world had no problems at all. It’s just because of the bad karma of sentient beings that it gets worse and worse and worse for these guys, who basically do it for you (even though you don’t know it).

 

The chakras start to unfold their flowers everywhere. It’s very hard to unfold these chakras, it’s very tiring if you use this quick tantric way. Another way, perhaps better since you don’t need a master nor instructions,  is anapana wherein you ignore them and just let whatever happens happen naturally, for the body knows what it has to do. But remember the rule – “first the loop, then the flowers.” That’s my teaching. First the loops of the chi channels thrust out, and then only later can the higher flower petals appear and unfold. I’m not going to say more other than “the loops (stems) come first, and then the flowers.” Just like within the body, “the arteries come first, and then the organs form.”

 

Perhaps not necessarily in this order, but the second furnace on the floor of the dan tien will now open, the furnace of the secret place in the front. We don’t talk about this secret thing for fear people would become perverted. This is “sila,” or the discipline of this school. There are no rules in reality, but one sets up rules for gods and men because of karmic consequences. As to where its sushumna and left and right channels go, I won’t tell. I’ll give you a hint: “The horns of a rhinoceros know plenty.”   

 

Later, as time goes on, if you can cultivate the sushumna within the sushumna within the sushumna and so on …, the stage of chi you can reach is called “immaculate.” At this stage, breathing is free and clear. The breath in the body feels unobstructed. There is no mental joy or excitement. The “bell handles” on top of the head are now extremely large, and without any effort they keep pouring out and transform. There is no feeling of physical bliss enervation in the body – no bliss. If you needed to use a word you would call it “peace” rather than physical bliss. The mind is even or steady. The gong-fu is called “stable,” which is akin to forbearance or patience. Ohm, I salute the Buddhas!

 

Remember that Arhats only believe in the  crown chakra that comes out the brahmarhandra. They don’t believe in the Buddha-randhra teachings. Trust in the enlightened ones, trust in them, for sure. If it wasn’t for them, none of us would have any teachings, so why would they lie if they said there is something higher? You must not depend on the crown chakra. In fact, you should not depend on anything at all.

 

I’m not going to tell you what stage this is. Go do some research and then you’ll know yourself. With all these teachings of layers within layers, you’ll also be able to gain an inkling of understanding as to why Buddha partitioned the Form Realm into so many heavens. It’s all science. There’s a reason he partitioned each dhyana into a specific particular number and the Form Realm into a certain number as well. Did you think it was arbitrary religious dogma? It’s all science with a meaning, there’s a meaning behind it and purpose. Gosh, another big secret revealed. This has nothing to do with “Buddhism” as a religion. This is just a cultivation science. Remember that. All you guys who keep thinking this is religion don’t have the slightest clue and certainly not the right understanding. In fact, we can say you’ve lost your head if you keep insisting on that. It means you’re just fighting yourself because you know what’s true deep inside you, but don’t want to accept the truth, so you’re searching for some way to negate it. “Can you attain this stage?” should be your only question. Yes, if you practice.

 

The next stage of chi is called “moist” – all the chi channels are flexible and have a shine. Encrustments fall away. The next stage is called “smoky.” The secret palace (the fourth furnace) emits vapor. The next stage is called “diamond” – hard and clear as diamonds, the earth element leaves this secret sushumna. Or is the beginning of the bindus being secreted? It’s very hard to tell…

 

The fifth furnace opens below the Buddha-randhra now, its base on the floor of the skull directly beneath it. I told you to trust the Buddhas – their dhyana is higher than the Arhat’s nirvana. Who could imagine a sushumna this thin? It’s fineness puts all the other channels to shame. So the root chakra, heart chakra  and crown all developed a small furnace, and then the secret place and now beneath the buddha-randhra. The funace has a sushumna, a left and right channel, and it powers the chakra above it. Later you’ll suprirsingly see the bindus, or bright points like tiny diamonds, exit the smallest of these sushumna and enter into the great circulation like a broken but contiuous stream.

 

“Space falls from space” [space element encrustings fall away like orange slices that fall apart]. “Preparedness.” These are some of the other stages you go through. I  haven’t mentioned all the stages all the time, just some important milestones.

 

The skull breaks open yet again and  the inner space body climbs out. It’s time for even those bodies to leave.

 

Next stage is “no talk.”

 

The next stage is “flowers” or “flowering.” Even the sushumna (and other chi channels) can have buds on their stalks.

 

The next stage is “afflictions are leaving” – wasps at this stage depart.

 

The next four stages are “solid space,” then “shining [??? - I forgot] space,” then “shimmering space” because the chi shimmers inside it, and then “Non space.”

 

After this the next stage is “united” .

 

After this  the next stage is “ground of jewels” – the floor of the dan tien is transformed. Amitofo.

 

After a few more stages, the next important stage is “sunrise.” If you think the stage is “dark sunrise,” “night sun,” or “black sun,” it’s because you haven’t cultivated hard enough. Blaze chakra, blaze!

 

Finally   shen comes out. Now you can start cultivating shen.

 

 

At this point I’m not going to explain anymore. I’ve already given you enough gong-fu explanations. If I didn’t speak of gong-fu you’d just ignore everything I have to say about cultivation. How much interest would you have? Nada, nothing, scant interest at all. But because I explain a little bit about Yogacara, Tantra, Vajrayana, Shingon, Taoism, Shiva Yoga, Internal Alchemy, and the Esoteric school, you think you’ve found some wonderful and marvelous secrets. It’s all useless information if you don’t practice. How I wish there was someone capable of understanding Zen, the true Esoteric school. This is all just the garbage of the path. So I don’t want to speak about gong-fu anymore. It’s time to go back to the basics.

 

 

If you think this is what Shakyamuni Buddha taught, you are mistaken. This is NOT enlightenment dharma. However, I wanted you to know what stages you reach from Indian tantric yoga, the yoga that sprouted from the lineage of Shiva and empowered thousands of sadhus and yogis and gurus who cultivated the body. But most didn’t get the Tao, mind you. Also you see how this connects with Chinese Taoism and nei-gong,   the interior part of the Chinese martial arts. As to Tibetan Buddhism and Vajrayana, or the Shingon school of Japan, you can see how the stages connect as well. I’ve tried to fill in the blanks for you and help you connect the traditions so you can see, once again, they all accomplish the same thing but just talk about certain parts of the path because of what they emphasize.  BUT … and this is a big “but”- no results come out this way. No superpowers, no real Samadhi, no dhyana, no enlightenment no Tao. You are just cultivating the physical body to health and these are the structures that arise. Big deal. You still don’t have dhyana, you still don’t have enlightenment, you’re still going to die and you almost wasted your life once again. You’ve got a good foundation for health and a long life, but so what?

 

So what do you do?

 

Now you try to really cultivate the Tao. Your gong-fu base is solid. It’s there. You’ve established some fundamental groundwork. Now you have two roads you can rely on: anapana and cultivating consciousness. Yet another road is just cultivating prajna. All the roads still rely on using the principles of cessation-observation.

 

If you studied Abhidharma and know the difference between the 6^th and 7^th and 8^th consciousnesses (see Three Texts on Consciousness Only, the Numata Institute), you try to first realize that the whole mental continuum is Mind-only, consciousness only and search for the root of that. Advaita Vedanta uses this method but by promoting the very end that’s so high rather than offer any intercessionary cultivation methods, I rarely see anyone get anywhere on that route other than memorize a lot of things and learn how to speak in an intelligent Vedantic way. So how do you do it? In the Surangama Sutra all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas instruct us on the methods they used to penetrate through to the source.

 

Your mind is always bombarded with appearances – sounds, forms, feelings, etc. – and you’re always clinging to them. The 6^th consciousness gets tied up with the body consciousness  like a heavy curtain, and it’s a mistake to try to push it, to try to move that molasses, to transform that chi or feeling. But that’s what tantrics do. Look further within and see, find that there is a free mind of thoughts that doesn’t have it’s constraints and then you’ve found the seventh consciousness. It’s free, instant, the mind behind thoughts that can flicker and is free of the senses. It’s the “mind within the mind” or mind behind the coarse thoughts you cling to as the sixth. But where does the seventh come from? It’s all still arising in reference to an ego or center point. There is no such thing. You must return to before that. THAT is the real cultivation, not cultivating physical gong-fu.

 

Now how do you achieve that? Maitreya, the founder of Yogacara, traced consciousness back to the source because he knew its components, and used that knowledge to help in his cultivation. Advaita Vedanta is similar to this at times, too.  But the greatest enlightened ones – Kuan Yin, Manjushri, Samantabadhra – simply traced hearing consciousness back to its source. Because you don’t need to know any theory about the structure of consciousness  (Abhidharma, Yogacara), but just follow hearing back to its source via the principles of letting go and cessation-watching, you can succeed if you do this. By concentrating on the hearing, you let go of the body consciousness and eye (image) consciousness, the two biggest objects of clinging that stand in your way. You can turn away from them, turn around from them and see the freedom that’s there, and in that instant everything changes immediately. So this is a brilliant strategy if you can learn how to do it.

 

Though you can read the Zen monk Han Shan’s story to learn how he did it, the only person who can teach you how to do it is you. You have to struggle a bit to separate the 7^th from the 6^th – that is, to identify the 7^th – and then to realize where it comes from. Struggle, with it. Bump around a bit. It took me a while to learn how to do it too. Don’t waste time on other stuff, but concentrate on this task. You can do it. This is the real cultivation, not gongfu. You’re looking for the source of mind and mentation. This is the road of practice you should be on, not the gong-fu road which took you nowhere. So don’t conentrate on the 7th or 6th, but introspect and ask WHERE IS IT ALL COMING FROM? All the sense data, the interior mind, everything rises together — where is that entire tableau coming from? That origin is what you have to find and rest in.

 

In fact, you can trace any single sense consciousness back to the source and then they all break apart. They are like separate knots that all unwind if you unwind a single one. So there are multiple avenues you can try and this is what you must cultivate. Buddha explained all this, and many roads of possible practice, as well as their results and many many stages I’ve been discussing, all in the Surangama Sutra. Gosh, it’s even free ont he internet, go search for it.

 

You could have saved   yourself tons of time and trouble if you just did this from the start, as Buddha instructed, but people always want something spectacular and peculiar. So I illuminated that road for you and told you we found nothing. Still no samadhi, or Tao but just a bunch of gong-fu. When did Shakyamuni Buddha ever tell you to “blaze a chakra”? He didn’t. In sixty plus years of teaching, my teacher never did either.  It’s the wrong way, but at least by so expounding I cleared up your misconceptions AND got you some foundational gong-fu so that you can devote yourself to REAL practice.

 

 

You have to cultivate MIND and then what’s supposed to happen will happen naturally and you don’t need effort, you don’t need a step-by-step roadmap, you don’t have to perform any particular yogas, you don’t have worry about chakras, chi channels or illusory bodies or river chariot rotations or microcosmic circulations or furnaces or anything. Put your mind at ease. The highest road is just letting go, turning inwards behind the sixth consciousness and investigating the source of the mind (thoughts), and dropping everything including the ego. All that other stuff is then taken care of.  So this is all you have to do and then you’ll not only succeed, but get all this stuff as well even if you don’t know it’s going on. When you cultivate the mind rather than tantra, the real chi comes up, it fills your channels completely to an extent you’ve never known before and you don’t have to lead or it push it, your mind becomes strongly alive and “brilliant” and you reach a stage higher than anything you could possibly reach through tantra. I promise.

 

We can say that “tracing back consciousness” is hard to do, but it just takes some effort. Now you can understand that what appears on the tableau of the mind is like layers, and if you try to peel them away one by one it will take forever. You’ll never be done. If you just let it go and ignore it, and strive with either anapana or consciousness only to turn within and FIND THE ORIGIN of the mental scenario, then you’re on the right road of practice. It’s right  there all the time. You’re always experiencing it, but you’ve become fascinated by gong-fu and lost your mind chasing after something else other than Mind, the origin. It’s just like someone who has a head on his shoulder and thinks he’s lost his head, and then goes running around looking for it. So the Tao is there, the empty mind ground is there. It is a place where no karma exists because no function yet comes out. If you do that, which is the next step in spiritual cultivation, you can begin to free yourself and then you’ll realize this:

 

Knowing is of the same nature as emptiness.

[“Appearance” is knowing. What appears in the mind is the knowing of appearances, or  what we call "arising."  That’s what we call “knowing.” There's an appearance there and because you know that, it's "knowing" even if you don't know what it means. The "knowing" just means experience.]

Knowing is the same essence as emptiness.

 

 

 

After the River Chariot rotation is established, after many rotations the body’s chi does change.

Let it Circulate, circulate, circulate.

Crack the bones, invert the organs, extrude out the dirty chi and push it out of the body.

Do this over and over again,

Using all your skill and concentration to keep the central channel upwards circulation alive.

Previous was the furnace stage called “Heating.” This stage we can call “Cooking.”

The chi at the stage you reach is finally called “Glistening.” It softens and runs smooth, it’s not sticky like jing and its transparency has some shine.

If you practice very hard, maybe Golden Acalanatha will come pay you a visit!

 

 The chi at the next stage you reach after the circulation has run quite some time is called “Noble.” It softens because most of the yin is gone.

 

Let me correct you here as an aside because the whole world has it wrong. The chakras don’t spin. You only run chi around them in circles at the beginning of the path to try to loosen them up. They are pumps. The chi runs through their center and they pump it, pushing it like peristalsis. The most important chakras are the root, heart, throat and crown because they are on the sushumna, central channel which you need to open for Samadhi and enlightenment. After you establish the opening of the root chakra, you don’t have to worry about this chakra so much but must concentrate on either the heart or throat chakra, visualizing them as silver, to lead the chi from the root chakra outlet to the flower bud at the crown where the channels all intersect. That’s the important thing.

 

Establish the sushumna to the crown! Make it stand erect from the root chakra, through the heart and throat chakras to the crown nexus. You have to connect it that point where the tu-mai connects with the jen-mai at the crown chakra. Thus the chi pushed upwards from below (the root chakra) will intersect with the circulation of the back and front channels, and it will follow the pushing of the tu-mai into the jen-mai circulation to get you to a higher stage. Don’t worry about the left and right channels. The important thing is to concentrate on making the crown chakra silver to draw the chi upwards to connect with it, or to make either the heart chakra silver or throat chakra silver to draw it up from the base, through their center, so that it gets to the crown. The whole important thing is the central channel from the root chakra to the crown. We need this opened and erect if you want to attain dhyana.

 

Break the white bone chi that encases the new chi. You can use external force to crush the bones open, or mentally expand the chi from within (the higher method). Or you can just leave things alone and in the fullness of time what needs to happen will happen, but I am speeding your path. Free yourself of the confines of the old skeleton. Eject the bodies within the body, eject the living skeletons, and eject the free form elixir that responds to thoughts. It’s just the discarded chi that no longer runs in the channels. Get rid of this garbage. It’s not precious as the Tao school suggests. You want dhyana and not an immortal body. Let the immortal body come later. Push it out the soles of the feet, the toes, the fingers, the palms, the eyes, the ears, the penis, every orifice and external chakra point. If you get to this stage, you’ll know what to do.

 

Invert your internal organs, open them up so that their chakras can pump out the unrefined chi from circulations ago. Let the vines of channels with chakras be expelled from their central openings. The prostate, kidneys, liver, gall bladder, heart, stomach and others – you can do it with all the organs, their coverings tear open, the old chakra stalks and petals and dirty chi pushes out. Let it come out, this is old chi that hasn’t yet transformed and is stuck within these channels from several stages past. Push all this garbage chi that’s still unrefined out the orifices. Offer it away.

 

I cannot stress “Offering” enough. If you don’t offer you cannot succeed on the great road.

 

Chalk like chi, paste like chi, cement colored chi, white chi, milk chi, glossamer chi—so many types I cannot count. I cannot describe their consistency or their colors. It doesn’t matter anyway since it’s always the same process. You are just “purifying the elements.” That’s all Buddha would say to explain because he didn’t want you clinging, and he didn’t want you to need a master. If you just follow his wisdom way instructions, you can do it all yourself.

 

Exit all this impure chi through the orifices but establish the sushumna upwards otherwise the chi from the root chakra will come out and fall forward, never proceeding through the heart chakra or throat chakra to the crown complex. Make sure the crown bud stays silver to attract it upwards, because you can always lead the chi forwards by projecting a silver circle, globe, flame, star or anything like that in front of it. It’s always attracted to it like a magnet.

 

When the chi collects in the form of a person, you can toss out this garbage that responds to thoughts at will. It can leave the bones, it can leave the body. It is garbage and not the thing to cultivate. The bodies within the body, that hug its shape like a copy – let them wiggle out the top as well. Make sure you use the white skeleton method on the back shoulders and ribs to do so, for the shoulders are where it always gets stuck.

So many, so many transformations. Either I’m an idiot to tell you, or helping you a lot. One thing is for sure, this is what the religions are after. And yet when someone explains it, people yawn and want something else!

 

The chi at the next stage is called “Dazzling” or “Sparkling.” Because of the sparkle of the crown chakra (where all the channels meet) it is thus named. It softens, it nourishes. The Tathagata Vairocana advises – KEEP THE SPARKLE ALIVE. Adjust your eating, adjust your habits, adjust your cultivation, concentrate on silverizing the heart or throat chakra where necessary, but do everything you must to Keep The Crown Chakra Silver Sparkle Flame Alive and the circulation going from below straight upwards. This keeps the tu-mai and jen-mai circulations alive, as well as the central, left, and right channels.

 

You can look at free Hubble images of the bright points of galaxies and stars and project them on your chakra spots (establishing bright points) to help get them started through visualization. You can look at images of Hindu temples that project upwards, imitating the crown chakra, to help you rise the chi. You can steal a quick glance at the sun, and then project the memory of that bright silver circular image at the heart, crown or throat chakra to help you keep the fire going. These are all fine methods I’m giving you. Strive to do it, strive not to fail. I’m really so kind to tell you these things. You cannot repay me in a hundred million years.

 

Remember the faults of the schools, and vow for complete and perfect Buddhahood. The Taoists reach this stage because they want to cultivate the physical body to immortality, for that goal is within reach if you just keep cultivating the body this way. Just open up the River Chariot and keep cultivating the body and you’ll have it.

 

But in Buddhism this is only transforming the physical body’s karmic chi into the Reward Body, a sambhogakaya or Enjoyment body. It is one of the three bodies of a completely realized one – the dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya. What you must do is use this as a basis for cultivating dhyana.

 

At this stage of Dazzling you are near the first dhyana. Bliss suffuses everywhere in the body because of the purity of the chi in its circulation, the body is enervated and joy and happiness is everywhere. But this is not high enough. Let go of the sixth consciousness and the seventh and cultivate prajna wisdom to go higher. Who is so stupid as to remain at the first dhyana and not want the complete objective?

 

The Taoists don’t wish to cultivate dhyana, and thus they don’t attain it. The many stories, such as of Ancestor Lu, tell this to be the truth. But some Buddhist masters don’t want to cultivate the sambhogakaya after they see the Tao either, and thus they don’t attain it as well but leave the world to cultivate elsewhere.

 

In the Esoteric School they strive to cultivate the impure and then pure illusory bodies after breaking through the skandhas, trying to use them to cultivate pure consciousness. They don’t realize their method is not the right way, but is simply Brahmanism yoga in disguise, a method Padmasambhava taught who was not teaching the great Buddha’s way.

 

The religions of the world, the secret mystery schools and societies, yoga, kabbala and all the rest. They all want to know this. They all want to reach this. It’s nothing secret, it’s just a process. All you need to do is cultivate just as I’ve explained.

 

I feel silly and awkward all the time because I have to tell you what’s important, what you should respect, what is rare, what is secret, or even the fact that you may not have the merit to receive these instructions. It sounds like a crankety old schoolmarm. I feel like a man wearing a sock puppet on his hand, who teaches a lesson, and then has the puppet speak the extra side comments and explanations because you don’t have the necessary background to know or appreciate anything. You may think it comes off as arrogance or haughtiness, but it’s not. Everything I tell you about the necessary respect for the dharma is the truth. The dharma has to be transmitted and this is the only way to do it because my country’s cultural understanding is so very gosh darn low. It’s almost non-existent so I even have to explain the significance of what I tell you, or the fact you have to respect it. You’re missing the background to appreciate and respect, so I even have to bow down and humiliate myself to tell you all that as well.

 

In this worldy world people die for the dharma, they give up life and kingdoms for the dharma. The celestials beg Buddhas to teach even though they have every enjoyment and luxury at their thoughts wish. People don’t understand how precious this information is, and how hard it is to attain these teachings or someone to guide you. They are so spoiled by free information in this information age that they think these teachings have the equivalent value of everything else. Ridiculous people without any culture, background, education or training. If you think you can get this elsewhere then go elsewhere. I don’t want to deal at all with people who don’t respect the fine dharma I’m giving. This is my own skillful means in the crazy circumstances of today’s “ten thousand voices” world. Go listen to the Dalai Lama talk, or a Mormon bishop, or the Pope or someone else. See what I care.

 

Ignorant people don’t know the value of what begins to jump you out of the Three Realms and an endless cycle of misery and suffering as you reincarnate over and over through ups and downs. Through aeons! This religion, that religion, this race, that sect, this country, that nation, that sex, no path at all, some merit, no merit, rich, poor, ugly, handsome, average, crippled, sick, blind, hungry, diseased, hell bound, upwards again and then repeat. This world, that world, another one next …. The orthodox religions paint a rosy picture of a final end but when merit is used up, karma pulls you down again. Without the teachings in that next life, what are you going to do? Another life wasted where you didn’t even make progress, and then again and again and again … How can you ever escape?

 

What is the solution? You cannot unite with the purity of consciousness within which this is all experienced. You have to cultivate PAST MIND to get to the original nature, and that path involves the prajna transcendental wisdom of letting go when experiencing mind. I’m only describing the stages of gong-fu transformation so you don’t get lost, and know what to do. But the real path is Mind-only. What people don’t realize is that the religious saints and sages of ALL traditions go this route and pass through these changes. However, there are ways in which you can veer off the straight track. Also, not everyone reaches the same levels of high attainment as well. Just read the Bible and you’ll see a wide difference in the Samadhi attainments of the prophets.

 

What the religions don’t realize is that Shakyamuni Buddha, the enlightened one, was a great yogi who went through all these things as well but did NOT stop at the purity of the alaya consciousness, but went through it. Consciousness no longer binds someone completely enlightened for they operate via prajna. That attainment is rarely achieved, but since that time a few have been able to do it because he showed the way. The religions are all lost as to what they think is the spiritual path, but Buddha explained the many facets you can follow clearly. You don’t have to be a “Buddhist,” but you should respect what he had to say if you want to get very far rather than cling to the notions you were born into because of karma.

 

Up and down you’ll bob without a road of true spiritual cultivation to follow. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Jain, Jew, Moslem, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist or whatever, this is the way of things. No being can escape it. You are not immune just because you don’t believe it or weren’t told or believe in something else. That’s just your lack of merit. Don’t think your own school is so important because frankly you’re just plain lost with your misconceptions. The public admires actors and singers (entertainers), presidents and kings, athletes, generals and rich men with money or power – Ozymandias all and names soon forgotten — but the Desire Realm celestials could care less as they are all lined up outside my door. Guess who knows the worth? If I don’t tell you the value to help you make progress, who will? But as to the secret merits you can now perform at this low stage, you are not worthy to hear.

After you go through all the skandhas, and produce the impure and then pure illusory bodies, are you done yet? No, you’ve just started. Within the physical body you must still  keep pouring the dirty chi out of chi channels to complete the purification of the “four (five) elements,” as termed by Buddhism. Buddhism usually just talks about four elements when it leaves out the space element, which is empty. When the chi channels completely empty of impure chi, the body deflates, and a new one is rebuilt. In Taoism this is called “expelling all the toxins from the body.” That’s it, just one phrase to summarize the process.

 

Of particular difficulty at this stage is to open up the chakra at the back of the head where the jade pillow is. When you can do this, you’re almost there to a stage that really means some initial accomplishment that’s worth something. After you can do that, there are several more degrees of purification but a major accomplishment is within reach – you can stabilize the bright points at each of the chakras and you can finally open up the real tu-mai and jen-mai chi channels and start the rotation of the “river chariot” spoken of in Taoism. This is also the chariot sometimes spoken of in Jewish mysticism.

 

Why is this rotation of chi within the major chi channels compared to a chariot? The best way for me to explain it is to have you imagine that you are  rolling up a carpet. You know the feeling as you turn that circular object over and over, rolling it. So imagine a string of chi whose tip points downward and hangs inside your root chakra in your perineum. Now imagine that it is pulled back and rolls up, like a carpet. That’s the sensation of rolling that then proceeds up the tu mai (back) and down the jen-mai (front) channels and through all the extra meridians which are filled with this thick semenlike jing-chi. Actually it’s more like a single impulse or undulation that proceeds around the entire microcosmic circuit in the body, for the whole circuit is one unbroken, fully connected string (stream) of chi. There’s no “tip” of chi – I was just trying to make you understand the feeling of the rotation.

 

This is the stage of the River chariot rotation. It is a “river,” or water chariot because the chi is clear and initially has the consistency similar to jing. It’s like the water element. Hence it is sometimes called the “Waterwheel.” In Buddhism, one of the minor side meanings of the “wheel of the law” refers to this stage of accomplishment.

 

Over  and over again this thick plasticine like chi rolls through the circuit of the channels, like a chariot whose wheels are sloooowly making its course through an orbit. You don’t try to push it out of the orifices as you’ve done in the hundreds of previous stages of transformation, but just let it perform this circulation on its own without any guidance. This is the secret stage that Taoism refers to, and many other mystery schools. This is the real thing for laying an initial foundation for the Tao. As I always tell you, opening up the chakras is not the Tao, but only lays a good foundation for the Tao. This is the stage where you’ve finally reached close to the final shape of the chakras, so you’ve “opened” them but still not quite. Just very close because there are several more transformations to go.   After you’ve reached this far, by establishing the bright points at THIS LEVEL of practice, you’re close to some stage of accomplishment.

 

You can only reach this stage after you had previously established almost permanent bright points on the major chakras from all the prior gong-fu work described in unwinding them, generating impure and pure illusory bodies, pushing out the dirty chi and so on. Previously it might have taken hours to establish a chi flame at one of the chakras due to visualization practice, and then next day you had to start all over again with concentration. Now however you can reignite the bright points quite readily to keep them going. It’s as easy as placing your thought on the location for a few seconds instead of struggling like within the previous stages. They are not “permanent” but I’m searching for a better word.

 

Previous to this, for so many stages  of transformation you poured impure chi out of the chi channels until the real shape of the chakras beneath could be revealed, and then you got them to unwind and expand. They were all wrapped up with layers of dirty filthy chi, and then channels within were filled with layers of chi and embedded in pools of dirty chi. Now they are clear but plasticine, for the chi is thick and viscous but extremely flexible. As time goes on and the River Chariot turns and turns, the chi of the rotation becomes less thick and more refined. I am only describing the initiatory phases of the process.

 

As I said, opening up the chakra at the back of the head is extremely difficult. After this feat, you can establish a nearly constant (easily re-ignitable) bright point at the four major and other minor chakra locations for the first time. You concentrated on bright points, or making tiny visualized images of chi flames at chakra openings and chi channel openings earlier along the way to help push out the dirty chi (transformed the five elements) but now those bright points are running relatively automatically on their own. You still need to watch them, but it’s harder to lose the flames, meaning that the chakra stays open and the circulation within stays unobstructed. This is Success – but don’t lose your semen despite the sexual desire at this stage. Yes, woman achieve these stages as well, so this is not just talking to men.

 

Then two or three days later after opening the Jade pillow chakra and establishing the bright points, if you haven’t lost your semen, then the rotation of the River Chariot will spontaneously initiate – once again due to the unwinding of the root chakra and the other chakras which has finally been reached because you established the bright points. Just prior to this rolling, everywhere within your body you can roll up or retract thick semen-like chi from inside your appendages (fingers, toes, the penis, etc.) and roll it in a lump to be discarded, which is something you’ve learned to do through all these other levels of transformation.

 

When the chariot rotation starts, this is the real meaning of the opening of the tu-mai and jen-mai, or front and back chi channels and the opening of the eight extra meridians in Taoism which comes along with this process. Another big secret revealed so that you can link the stages. The Chinese schools focus on the front and back channels; the Tibetan and Indian schools focus on the middle, left and right channels, but these have not opened just yet – you still must wait a bit. The channels to the feet have even been opened all the way through to get this far, otherwise the River Chariot could not undergo its rotation. In fact, three major channels open in the feet – the heels, and two more in front of it. It is almost impossible to open these chakras unless you get to this stage, which is why one of the respectful names for a Buddha refers to his having opened the great chakras in the bottom of the feet. The heel chakras do most of the pumping for the river circulation.  

 

I’ve told you to concentrate on the feet with the skeleton meditation and it’s extremely difficult to open up all the channels and chakras within it. You’ve also been able to open up channels to the organs (heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, etc.) too in order to get this to happen, though you also could have ignored them through this process. In other words, you don’t have to concentrate on them at all because they open naturally after you open all these other chakras and channels.

 

At this stage, the real tu-mai and jen-mai  chi channels are quite large in diameter (circumference) compared to the thin thread-like chi channels you concentrated on when first trying to open up the chakras when you first started upon the road of the Vajrayana-Esoteric school tantric focus as described by Tsong Khapa and the Six Yogas of Naropa. Of course I’ve explained how to practice this on the website with free articles and blog posts, and must tell you once again that there’s no better full body cultivation method than the white skeleton meditation for the stage of preparation. Of course I’ve gone through other techniques and meditation methods as well. Prior to this you’ve had all sorts of teachings on consciousness, heaven, Taoist transformation, Christian cultivation, Jewish cultivation, etc. It’s up to you to do the work to study and practice. If you don’t lay a foundation of intensified practices, you cannot get this far at all.

 

The rolling of the chi through its channels (the River Chariot rotation) starts slow at first and then speeds up, and eventually becomes smooth. This chi is extremely thick and viscous at first. It’s more akin to jing, and then with rotation, like the churning of butter, becomes  more refined like chi. Thus we have the jing to chi transformations of Taoism. In fact, this IS the real jing to chi transformations mentioned by Taoism. 

 

The jing being pumped by the root chakra over and over again in a circuitous body circulation through the front and back channels, so its origins seem to come from down below. It’s like one long string or loop of chi that is being  recirculated   over and over again to refine it. It proceeds for the root chakra up the back to the top of the head, then down the front, to the root chakra again, through that to the feet, and front the feet upwards through the root chakra again. One big circuit. From within the feet a chakra pumps the chi upwards to the bottom of the root chakra, completing the circuit from below. This is the meaning of the Tao school injunction to breath through the bottom of the feet. It  only becomes true at this stage of attainment.

 

Naturally the body is initially warm to hot as the River Chariot first initiates, and over time the temperature evens out to warmness  rather than any hotness like fierce fiery kundalini. Several hours later, next comes coolness and the onset of subtle bliss. This, I’m describing, are just the first few hours of the process.  The previous practices of kundalini yoga, or kundalini cultivation to open chakras and channels that you started upon ages ago are long forgotten as this is the real thing, the real kundalini bliss.

 

Because of the heat, just prior to this stage sometimes the chi inside the body strips off and curls down off the inner walls of the inner chi layers of the physical body. Also, various full sized human chi bodies wiggle free from within and are ejected out the top, often being stuck at the shoulders from wriggling free. Those are some of the final purifications that happen (toxins ejected) before the River Chariot rotation commences. So many transformations, so many purifications. They’re all just summarized as “expelling toxins” within Taoism or “purifying the five elements” within Buddhism. In Tantra they are called “expelling winds” out of the channels. The vocabulary is different but it’s all the same thing.

  

The opening of the River Chariot — this is how the body should be. This is the  natural state of a truly healthy human being. On top of the head in the center is a little loop, or “flower” or “bud” or “bow” wherein all the chi arrives from down below. This is the “Nirvana Palace” of Taosim and Sacred or Crown chakra of Orthodox Buddhism and the Esoteric School. It is the Baihui location of Chinese medicine. You can feel it is opened, and the channels in the sides of the head open as well. From below, near the perineum, is the root chakra pumping. But it has been so transformed through this process to its original shape that the pumping of the circulation is now smooth  like a rolling wave. A single pulse, a smooth ripple or undulation rides its way  throughout the entire orbit of the front and back chi channels. All the other chakras are opened, so there is nothing that provide an obstruction any longer to the circulation. This is truly the “Yuan” of the Chinese Tao School, the initial fruit of the Tao. Sweet saliva flows profusely. If you want to see what a sage has written about this stage, you can see pp. 78-79 in Tao and Longevity, by Huai-chin Nan (available on amazon.com).

 

The mind starts to enter  dhyana and is quiet, but one must still use wisdom to detach from the sixth consciousness. It’s easier now to realize what the seventh consciousness or thinking mind actually is compared to the sixth consciousness, or grasping mind. Had you only been able to differentiate between the sixth and seventh consciousness earlier, you would have been able to accomplish this much sooner. Such is the way of both Buddhism and Vedanta.

 

The breathing slows and often stops and one can remain that way in a state of Xi. This is why Buddha taught people to enter this stage through practicing the methods of the Anapanasati Sutra. Just that method alone, combined with the white  skeleton meditation and a life of discipline (celibacy, no lust) can get you here).

 

The limbs soften inside and feel light and pliant as the rotation commences. I want to use the word “nonexistent” but you know they are existent, and yet that phrase comes to mind. They are so soft inside as they are being transformed. A subtle happiness spread across the mind as you are entering dhyana. The wonders of the mind are just opening up. 

 

Are there any special powers that come out? No, life is as ordinary as it was before. The bustle on the street, hawkers selling their wares, people shopping and doing errands. Only now one is free and easy in their mind and as their body slowly diffuses into bliss, comfort spreads everywhere.

 

The smoothness of the chi flow, even with the slight undulation or ripple, reminds you of the soft caress of a beautiful woman. The purity of the stage is like a beauty with a flawless, creamy smooth complexion. The yang chi glow of a perfect round white jade comes to mind. It is soft, it is round, it is natural, it is lovely. I can only say “beauty flows to the limbs” or “beauty flows throughout the limbs” or “beauty suffuses everywhere.” This is the stage Mencius called “Beauty,” for that’s the only word you can think of to describe it (and thus you have a linkage to the Confucian cultivation school and its way of describing the stages). It is jing that has not transformed into chi but is suffusing everywhere to soften, moisten and open all the channels, and thus being still yin it is referred to like the feminine. It is a beautious stage, beautiful, a thing of beauty. I can only say that.

 

Softness suffuses everything. The joy bubbles up inside. Even the moon, as pure and round as it seems, is not as perfect as this state. No pearl is as elegant for pearls are hard and gritty by comparison. Accepting of all human beings, kindness, gentleness, softness and humility flow freely as the yang flows. This is the true human nature.

 

Soft, round, full

The worries of the past fall away.

Beauty flows to the limbs,

The body seems as if not there.

 

A fine wine cannot in any way compete,

I offer it, I offer it to everyone,

But how can I share it with you?

Better just to leave it alone.

 

Sexual desire disappears. Who can think of sex at a time like this? Coarse thoughts disappear as if in a dream. The hormones in the body descend like rain from above feeding the flowers below. You wonder – “what types of grasses will grow up from down below (around the root chakra)?” This is NOT the circulation of the jen-mai nor the sweet saliva I’m speaking of at this stage, but a shower of hormones from within the head that falls downward within the body. It’s like a light sprinkling or fine shower of drops that you can see now and then, mostly from the front part of the head. It’s like a light rain or drizzle, and you can sometimes see the droplets sprinkle down. This is the kan hexagram of Taoism.

 

You can feel the wave as it rolls up the tu mai and then down the front. From the heels it ascends upwards, the chakras in the feet pulsing. Eventually the central, left and right channels separate themselves from the back and establish themselves and their circulation proceeding from below and straight upwards. Initially these channels were as stuck or glued to the tu-mai back channel, but now they peel away and free themselves so that they stand erect in the center of the body.

 

What I’ve just revealed is a big secret – people miss these channels because they are attached to the back governor channel and because the chi through them proceeds up to the bud, you don’t notice them. Not until they peel away and establish themselves to go directly upwards. Whenever you feel like there are three channels near the back of the body, with the large one being the tu mai, understand that the left and right channels are trying to peel away so that they can stand erect, and when that happens they will pull the sushumna forwards as well. This is a yoga  secret you won’t  find mentioned in any schools. It also tells you that when you have to do this it means you are not cultivating hard enough because then the channels would have already established themselves. You must ask for protection from the Buddhas (enlightened beings) at these stages as it’s  very easy to lose your progress and because the gong-fu is so rare and fragile.

 

This then is the channel structure described by the Buddhist Esoteric school – first the front and back channels opened, and now the left right and central sushumna next. Up from the root chakra the chi ascends to the bowed loop in the center of the head, down it also then comes again through the left and right channels to return to its source. But the width of these channels is LARGE compared to the tiny channels you concentrated on to get this whole process started many stages ago. The real governor (tu mai) and  jen-mai channels seem almost an inch thick in width, whereas the left-right-central channels are thinner, but still nearly a quarter inch or more in width. They are now full, clear, translucent and unobstructed. Pumping, pumping, pumping flowing, flowing, flowing – this is the true microcosmic, macrocosmic circulation you read about in Tao school and alchemy books. But I don’t think the people who write about these things hardly ever get there.

 

This upwards and downwards flowing chi next to each other is the meaning of “Heaven and earth communicate” or “sky and earth will be joined.” It’s the meaning of the Heaven or sky I-ching hexagram (chien) seeking the earth (kun hexagram) in Taoism and Chinese philosophy.  It refers to the chi ascending upwards in the central channel, and dribbling down the left and right channels while the front and back channels undergo their own circuitous circulation. The central channel sends chi up to the bud because of the root chakra pumping, which is also pumping the chi up the tu-mai at the back,  and at the top there is a little circuit of channels in a loop which allows some it to  fall again through the left and right channels. So there is a jen-mai and tu-mai circulation, and this little left-right-central channel circuit has its own circulation as well. So many secrets, so many secrets revealed.

 

The going up and coming down of the central channel and its flanking left and right channels reminds me of Jacob in the Old Testament writing about his dream of angels going up and down a ladder, and so we have the link to Jewish mysticism once again. Angels don’t go up and down ladders, but the chi ascends and descends this way between the root chakra and the flower bud at the top of the head in a constant circulation, just as the front and back channels proceed in the circuitous motion as well. Thus I have revealed the process in plain language and linked it to the Esoteric school, the Tao school and a single symbolic account from the Bible. No one has ever revealed these secrets before, but now you know clearly what the sages were talking about. This is just the operation of the human body after all the chi channels have been cleared.

 

Two wings or petals, as large as fans, spread out from the root chakra on the left and right sides. The size of these two wings are enormous as they spread across the entire bottom of the pelvic cavity and  are constantly bowed arched upwards and pinned downwards within the cavity because of their size. This is like the Chinese peng bird of old described in Chuang Tzu, whose wing span was said to be as large as the seas.  Slowly these two petals rise and fall like a bellows in motion. Slowly they flap up and down – the pumping of a bellows with the root chakra in the center.

 

The root chakra itself assumes a squarish shape as it rises up out of its base a bit, and this becomes the “furnace” we speak of in Taoism and other cultivation schools. This is the only stage you can probably call the “furnace” even though people practice kundalini cultivation and feel warmth. Initially the chi color is a bright white diamond or silver-bluish point (that’s what a “bindu” is) when the process first starts, but it sometimes flickers  with the red color of the fire element. As soon as it does that it transforms back to silver again. At times it will even seem as if a lack smoke is given off as various chi are burned away, but this is very rare and not to be expected. You should just know that it happens now and then. This raised root chakra is the “li” hexagram of Taoism, and the hormones descending like spring rain (not the jen mai descent, but a virtual sprinkling of water hormones from inside the head falling downwards) is the kan hexagram.

 

You cannot achieve this mixing of li and kan until you reach this stage (after clearing out all your channels as previously described) whereupon it happens naturally. About the time that the bright point of the furnace first flickers to red, a few hours later the color yellow forms in front of the furnace at its base in the lower tan tien. It’s like a field or pool in front of the upraised furnace (because the bottom of the cavity is a bit like a bowl). Later  in back of the furnace the pool becomes filled with purple, blue, and sometimes red. But these are only temporary changes that quickly disappear, as there are far many more transformations to go through. Also at times the chi of the body (sometimes the corwn, and sometimes the whole body) turns yellow, but this also quickly reverts back to the clear state.

 

There are many changes like this in the first few hundred hours after the Chariot starts its rotation. None should be considered permanent. However, understand that this is basically the “field of elixir” in the dan tien. It is just chi that collects around the base of the upraised root chakra, which looks like a square on a pedestal since it’s raised above the base of the floor. Only the Esoteric school calls this the root chakra. To other schools it’s called the furnace, or you can even call it a “celestial pump.”

 

At this stage of achievement, all sorts of higher beings will come to you to ask for help in their own cultivation. Previously when you broke through the conception skandha all the local ghosts and spirits would appear asking for assistance in attaining the Tao. At that stage one could even convert the dakinis who had samadhi attainments. Now beings with heavier gong-fu come, including animals who have been cultivating. For instance, a  lion or elephant Bodhisattva or mahaghora might come  to you because they were having troubles in their own channels at this stage of cultivation, and just needed a little push or assistance to open their own chakras and establish their microcosmic circulations. As you already know all the stages and how to clear out every chakra, this is what a Bodhisattva does to help. All sorts of beings can visit from the entire cosmos. You now have a (very) small set of gong-fu skills that you can grab their chi and help open  some channels or chakras for them, but only for those advanced enough who have been cultivating to this stage of translucent chi and who have enough merit.

 

This is why the Taoists say that they “test” people to see if they are virtuous or not. If someone is not virtuous you should leave them to themselves and their own efforts rather than voluntarily step forward and  help when not asked. If evil people succeed in cultivation it doesn’t make them less evil. You’re just empowering them to do more evil in the world. Hence one has to be careful who they teach or take on as students. This is a rule. You need virtue and merit to succeed.

 

Not everyone is ready because of the lack of virtue and merit, the first stage (I might remind you) of the spiritual path. So just as an example, when I see people who donate even a tiny amount to www.haitiwater.org after hearing of the need and  giant merit bang for the buck,   I already know who can succeed at cultivation and who will just remain an arm chair reader of cultivation books. No matter how much you might argue or think how good or great you are, you cannot succeed without merit  on the cultivation path, and you can never say your merit is great enough. Even the Tao school says you must do 3,000 great deeds (saving a life is one great deed) and 1,000 minor good deeds. Another school of Taoism insists on more than 800 virtuous deeds and more than 3,000 hidden virtues.

 

Buddhism insists on the same requirement of accumulating virtue and merit to achieve success, just as Christianity reminds  you that you  need virtue in order to reach heaven. This is no joke but truth. That’s why I mentioned www.Haitiwater.org for you because a single chlorinator ($265) will serve up to 10,000 people every day for a quarter of a century. Diarrhea, fevers, dysentery, typhoid, malaria, cholera, hepatitis and death all   disappear because of one tiny change you make possible. Since the entire community gets its water from that one source,  you put an end to death and disease in one stroke for one about two hundred and fifty bucks. That’s attaining merit. Do it! Why you even have enough merit to receive these lessons is beyond me as what I’m teaching you is precious and rarely given. In fact it’s NEVER spoken at all. So I’m hoping you’ll do the hard thing and generate the merit.

 

So now with all you’ve been taught, you have the linkage between the Orthodox school of Buddhism with Yogacara and Vajrayana  the Esoteric School. This stage of yoga we’ve reached is an initial stage that Shiva, the great yogi, wants people to cultivate in Hinduism though of course you can reach it through Vedanta just as you can reach it through Orthodox Buddhism. How so? Through the cultivation of  prajna, the dhyana and anapana. We also linked these gong-fu stages to Jewish mysticism,  and now the explanations in terms of Taoism. If you look at western alchemy closely, you’ll see the same thing. Even “pagans” and some bard poets in Celtic mysticism have hinted at this stage of “inspiration.”  It’s non-denominational. If you’re smart and wise, and understand the principles, you can use lots of paths to get here. If you don’t know what you’re doing and don’t put in the practice effort, then you might as well forget it. But I’ve given you all the teachings in our many articles, blog posts and books.

 

Everyone who cultivates goes through these stages, and some schools explain the stages clearly while others don’t. Now I’ve given you an explanation as to where the stages fit into the whole sequence of cultivation practice. All this prior work to get to this level of physical transformation, and it’s still just physical gong-fu and not the Tao. You’re only at the stage of jing transforming into chi. You used concentration to get here, but you have not attained true dhyana. On this path of cultivating form, few reach this far. That’s why Buddha told people to cultivate dhyana directly instead by letting go, and then afterwards to come back and transform the physical body. But I’ve united these various schools together for you to see how it all fits together. You’ve only established  a foundation for mind-only work so that you can attain the Tao and “unite with Heaven” as Taoism calls it. That’s the beginning of the true dhyana attainments such as the first, second, third, and fourth dhyana. You’ve established the physical foundation of becoming a  Taoist “Immortal,” but you haven’t achieved it yet.

 

Remember the Buddha is also known as a “Great Golden Immortal” or “Great Golden Arhat”, which refers to someone who goes beyond this stage of transformation to fully complete the transformation of the physical body so that they can appear and disappear anywhere at will like Taoist Immortals. This is something I’ve actually seen for myself. If you can understand that various Hindu masters have reached this stage, then you can link to understanding yet another school as well. But these are the physical fruits of the Tao which we are talking about, not the Mind-Only attainments. For that we have to study the peak teachings of Buddhism. But anyone who practices can get to these stages if they just practice correctly – they are not the province or possession of anyone school because they are non-denominational.

 

One thing is for sure: you cannot achieve any of this without practice, merit, discipline (sexual restraint), and cultivating empty mind.

 

After many hours, the chi currents are now like milk flowing with honey. With every revolution its constitution is becoming lighter and more refined. How can you understand this  state if you don’t experience it yourself? The sweet saliva flows like a river … this is the “water of  life” spoken of in Christianity. All the religions have this same stage but only if you cultivate. All along the saliva has been sweet at various stages of cultivation progress, but now it flows like water, a gushing stream. Just prior to this you can open up the mouth cavity at the top under roof of the mouth and push the poisons out from this hole. Prior to this, it is not usually used as an exit point for expelling dirty chi from the body, but now you’ve cleaned this out too along with the jade pillow chakra in the back of the head. Finally, after a long time, you can open up the translucent chi channels throughout the width of the tongue, too.

 

Finally the two chakras on the top of the shoulders will open, just as the two fans opened on the left and right sides of the root chakra. The crown chakra now rises out of its base and produces a protrusion out of the skull like the knots on top of a Buddha’s head. Remember, these are the stages of   transformation for the physical body rather than for the pure and  impure illusory bodies whose crown chakra will look extremely different, such as you see in the pictures of other enlightened beings. I am giving you all the secrets of all these schools in hopes you are no longer confused, resolve the contradictions, see the step by step stages, have faith in practice, and actually achieve these states themselves.

 

In truth, this is only gong-fu which lays a foundation for achieving the Tao, but you still haven’t achieved it. You’re just purifying the body and achieving a better state of health in the process. At this point your vitality will return and gray hair will turn to its original color again. The body is experiencing renewal. But this is just a physical foundation. The true Tao is seeing the dharmakaya. You’re just transforming  the body and laying a good foundation.

 

The Tao involves cultivating the mind rather than forms, so people who get stuck in these things and think they’re marvelous will lose their way. The actual efforts should be on realizing the dharmakaya and uniting with it. Cultivating the body was just to make that easier. This is called “cultivating life,” not cultivating the original nature. However, you can bypass this entirely by just cultivating mind in the first place to realize the dharmakaya, and along that avenue or road of practice you have the highest chances of  success.

 

But what about all these bodies and layers of chi within and outside the channels? After the creation and destruction of the universe over and over again for aeons after aeons, these are the many various forms that have developed over time, and must be ejected/cleaned out of your chi channels so that you can attain the most primordial possible form of the five elements. You don’t need to know anything about these processes to succeed in spiritual cultivation other than to let go and cultivate an empty mind, and in this way we can say that Taoism is probably best school in terms of simplifying the path’s gong-fu transformations into a triplex of jing, chi and shen, but so few practitioners achieve anything in Taoism (and most go astray down side paths that amount to nothing, following strange practices according to their own secret wants and inclinations) that you have to doubt the efficacy of the popular teaching methods in this school. Taoists usually confuse different traditions, choose the wrong practices, and typically think all they need is to find some Master who will teach them some secret method so that they can become an Immortal instantly. Look how hard it is!

 

Buddhism has produced the most successes, along with Vedanta, Kashmir Saivism, and some other schools, and within Buddhism you can say that the number of Orthodox Buddhist practitioners who succeeded far outweighs those of the Buddhist Esoteric school (Tibetan Buddhism and Vajrayana) despite its claims of superiority. As to the western schools, of course some individuals succeed but most do not for lack of clear instructions, and for those that do, this is what they initially attain as the physical basis or foundation.

 

And this brings up the western mystery schools, such as the Rosicrucians, Golden Dawn, Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, Ordo Templi Orientis, etc.  Most of their practices and longings were based on corrupt understandings of Jewish kabbalah practices, which were in turn based on incomplete understandings of Ezekiel  1  - ma’aseh merkavah or “works of the Chariot.”

 

This is already the chariot rotation you have reached at this stage. But go search and you won’t find any kabbalah literature able to explain what I’ve just given you. The practitioners and teachers just don’t know. In fact the western Mystery schools are also always desperately searching for this information and here it s free for all. But can you attain it? You need merit, discipline, concentration, and the right techniques. Frankly it is doubtful that anyone will succeed. In my Teacher’s 60+ years of teaching he always says he’s never found anyone who’s reached the stage of jing transforming to chi. Everyone thinks it’s happening at much lower stages of the path, but this is the real thing and beyond this stage there is even more! Visions of Buddhas, Thrones (Jewish mysticism),  Buddhas with dark blue faces like Lions  (Christian mysticism, Revelations), pure illusory bodies, crown chakra emanations, … are all peanuts compared to this stage, and it’s only the foundation stage for the dhyana.

 

In Hindu culture we have the great yogi Shiva who worked hard at all sorts of yogic techniques to get here and then get the Tao. The tradition of Gaudapada also achieved it. Shakyamuni, who also traveled the yogic path for years, went through all of this as well but after he achieved the fruit he described the path in a different way other than form so that it would live on and  help societies and be transmitted in such a way that more people would attain it (rather than by cultivating form). Nevertheless if you read the sutras and search, you will find that he did explain all the form transformations within his own set of excellent descriptions. So if you follow the form schools – Taoism, Tibetan Buddhism, Esoteric School, Shingon, kabbalah, western alchemy, Vajrayana, yoga, tantra, western mysticism, etc. – beware.

 

The entire gist of the western mystery schools –  the Rosicrucians, Golden Dawn, etc. — is to actually have you achieve THIS particular stage of attainment, and yet no one gets near it or even understands it. Secret societies  speculate on hidden meanings and mysteries, and so unfortunately speculation is all they ever come to. This is the foundational stage for dhyana attainments you reach — the stage of chakras opening, breaking through the skandhas (or koshas), purifying the four elements, the establishment of the channels, the pure illusory body, the River Chariot rotation, jing transforming into chi. In Tibetan Buddhism they just call this the cultivation of the chakras, channels and bright points (bindus) which are the flame points at the centers of the chakras. In Zen this is the stage of cultivating realization because you’re getting ready to attaint he dhayna and then the Tao. In terms of the five great stages of the path, this is the stage of True Cultivation Practice.

 

I’ve only bothered to explain it from the standpoint of cultivating the body, but warned you that few ever succeed along this path but many succeed along the prajna wisdom – Mind-Only – dhyana cultivation path of Buddhism and Vedanta. Nevertheless, even when you cultivate that route and succeed in enlightenment by realizing the dharmakaya, to be complete you also have to cultivate the sambhogakaya, which is what we’re doing here. As to the nirmanakaya, let’s not talk about this yet. This refers to a high stage of cultivation upon opening your crown chakra, and frankly I don’t think anyone is qualified to hear about it.

 

I admire the Western mystery schools and their practitioners because of their longings and aspirations. In fact, I wish members would familiarize themselves with the materials in my course on Western Alchemy that shows what it’s all about. It’s actually my one favorite product that I’ve produced but few want it, and yet I guarantee you don’t know much of what’s in it. Pity, because the material is so good.

 

http://www.meditationexpert.com/alchemy-fugiens-tapes1.htm

 

Unfortunately for the kabbalah   practitioners and Western mystery schools (Rosicrucians, etc),  ardent and virtuous people get confused in their search for the Tao. It is a pity, it is a pity. I’ve laid it all out for you up to this very stage of jing transforming into chi and the rotation of the chariot. This lays the base for the perfection of the human physical body, an ideal of human perfectability in the manner of Enoch and Metatron of the Bible. When you reach this stage you can choose to cultivate the human body to perfect health and extremely long life, or you can go further and choose the Tao to go beyond the human and celestial. This is the realm of the Buddhas (enligthened ones), otherwise one is simply at the stage of a yogi or rishi.

 

One thing is for sure and becomes perfectly clear when you understand all this and accomplish any of it. The old Jewish idea of human perfection through strict adherence to the law, meaning Jewish rules and regulations, can bring you absolutely nowhere along these lines. Every accomplished sage warns you about the uselessness of rules and regulations in attaining the Tao, but for lack of a cultivation path the Jewish religion has made the “law” into the path for the common man just as Christianity has made “belief” into the path and Islam has also made “adherence” into the path. It is unfortunate that these schools make these and so many other mistakes. Some of the biggest problems in these traditions arose because Moses was not a high stage practitioner (this is easy to tell from dozens of examples int he Bible) but one who, because of his low attainments and low wisdom, therefore interjected many asura types practices into his mission and thus these streams, and thus began centuries of warfare, anger, hate, vindictiveness, revenge, materialism, manipulation, coarse sexuality, the desire for control and conquest, persecution and destruction. To be bereft of the cultivation path is one thing, but to fall into the mentality of the asuras and follow their angry warlike, power hunger and sensual ways only leads to the destruction of culture and civilization in the end. All races, nations, empires, religions and civilizations -  for instance the Assyrians, Aztecs, Mayans, Roman Empires, Egyptian religion, Zorasterians, etc. — die after their merit is used up. The boon of perpetuity is granted to no one; impermanence marks everything. If you therefore want continuance, reform yourself and change for the better. As the prophets of old said, “turn back to God” otherwise following the asura paths means doom in the end and self-destruction due to your own lack of wisdom that you take for cleverness. Who really understands what I’m talking about except the Buddhas?

 

Cultivation of the form aspect of the body is very difficult and only someone of excellent intelligence and extreme merit can do it, and even then only if they have an extremely strong  foundation in the Mind-Only teachings and prajna wisdom principles of the path that have nothing to do with body transformations. This is another reason why Vajrayana practitioners are forced to study for nearly two decades before approaching this path as we’ve described.

 

Okay, so what happens after you establish the River Chariot rotation and a few dozen hours go by? A new set of transformations — After a certain while, the squarish furnace will have a silvery white circle develop around its base, and then the whole furnace will extend itself and rise upwards towards the bud. This sets off a different set of transformations. Yet again the old chi must be ejected and new chi develop at a higher level, just as before.

 

To concentrate on the bright points WITHIN the channels, rather than to concentrate on just the river chariot rotation, to get to the next level is extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely, extremely difficult hard beyond compare. At this stage the jing within the channels sticks to the sides, and has to be melted a bit to get it to go. Previously you did not really have to do that. But I’m not going to go into the explanations of these higher stages just yet.

The only thing I’m going to tell you is that all you’ve been doing is cultivating the sixth consciousness. Chi and consciousness are linked. You realized that in breaking through the layers of chi connected with the skandhas. You realize what that means in terms of purifying the chi channels and the five elements. Now you have to realize that the sixth consciousness itself is connected to a type of chi, and you have to SEE THIS, realize this rather than continue playing with form. In fact, you have been making a fundamental mistake of cultivation by bringing the sixth consciousness into the body when it is non-local, it is everywhere. Buddha explains this clearly in the Surangama Sutra to Ananda, and yet most religious people succeed int heri cultivation by cultivating imaginary cognition.

If you want to cultivate higher, you have to turn within — away from the sense organs just as Hatha yoga says — and pass through attachment to the seventh consciousness and then the eighth consciousness (the alaya) and then let go of that. Then you can reach the Tathagatagarbha or Womb Matrix of Pure Buddhahood, Perfect and Complete Enlightenment that jumps out of the Three Realms of Desire, Form and Formlessness. Look how high Buddhism takes you past the stage of realizing Brahma!

So I’ve just given you the SUPREME SECRET. You’ve only been cultivating the sixth consciousness this entire path. It’s not very high. To get to dhyana you have to let go of this consciousness – which also means the chi that’s connected with this consciousness that you’ve been cultivating all along — and then you can reach a higher stage of spiritual attainment. You may not know that what I’ve just told you is worth the treasures of the universe. If you can realize the meaning, you now know how to cultivate. The celestial realms are now open to you if you can detach from the coarse sixth consciousness, but remember that these high realms are still unreality compared to the True Tao. This is why even the Form Realm and Formless Realm heavenly denizens all venerate the Buddha and ask the Buddhas for teachings. You might not know, but THEY KNOW. They can see all the stages of gods and beings, including what people mistakenly take as God the Creator (due to low cultivation achievements and wrong thinking) in various worldly religions created throughout the universe, and with eyes wide open recognize the goal is to cultivate the Fundamental Essence of It All, the essence of the original nature. How can I explain it to you and wash away your misconceptions?

Stay Alert! Stay Alert!
Stay in the aliveness side rather than cling!
You don’t need to know what’s going on [with words]
It [the workings of the sixth consciousness] has all been one big molasses dream.

What’s behind the 6th is the 7th
We cling to the curtains rather than step back
If you could only let go and let function give birth
Most of your troubles would be solved

I’m “alive” when it’s gone
Why have I been so stupid to cling?
I sense that true birth is birthlessness
But my mistake is that I still cling to clarity.

Bright, alive, aware,
Empty, thorough, through
Do you know what happens when you give up the 6th?
The impure chi gets extruded like before
but you don’t have to worry about nothin’  [know it, direct it].
I missed the “ordinary mind” that’s always empty there as the essence,
because I became fascinated by mental movement and excitement
You need to make a fundamental wish to regain your original mind
and then cultivate by giving up clinging.

There’s no such thing as the “passing of days”
That’s just the sixth mind rambling along.
The Middle Path is pure because it does not cling to any Self
And phenomena stay [are] just as they are

 

Accumulate some merit — donate to www.haitiwater.org, or loan some money to www.kiva.org or make a donation to Heifer International www.heifer.org, Orbis www.orbis.org, Smile Train, Operation Smile, Handicapped International, Doctors Without Borders, www.worldvision.org, www.mercycorps.org, and so forth. It’s near Christmas. Give to others who have less, and with some of these organizations your gift can play a role that lasts for a lifetime and even multiply going forwards. Buddhas try to make the world a better place but they need you to make the effort — what did you think they were doing? One of the biggest bangs for the buck and a gift that keeps on giving is donating a chloronator or fraction thereof (they even write your name on it) at www.haitiwater.org. We all need merit to succeed; we’re all here to make the world a better place. If I died tomorrow and said I did one thing, at least I could say I supplied a community of ten thousand people with clear drinking water and banished disease and sickness overnight from my efforts. Never think you have enough merit, never. If you did you’d already be in the dhyana heavens rather than here!