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.

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!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Song of Songs (the Song of Solomon or the Canticle of Canticles) has long been recognized as a special book in the Bible. Readers recognize that its themes seem to have nothing to do with the typical religious content of the Old Testament, and yet here it is in the Bible classed among the sacred works called “The Writings.” There must be a reason.

The reason is due to the fact that it’s a cultivation text, but because it is a cultivation text non-cultivators cannot decipher it. Yes, even the Bible contains accounts of higher and lower stages of cultivation, though mostly of the lower sort. You don’t always have to turn East to find the accounts of successful spiritual cultivation.

The earliest Jewish rabbis were certain that the Song of Songs cannot possibly mean what is says literally because it concerns erotic love between a man and a woman. Early Christian scholars agreed with the rabbinical analysis that these verses could not possibly depict worldly love. So how can we find out what it means?

Because it contains erotic imagery, some of the Jewish mystical schools that relied on the kabbalah did not want students to study the Song of Songs until they were mature, and yet this too means that they recognized it as a cultivation text but could not decipher it. It’s said that it was “the most frequently interpreted book of medieval Christianity” (Ann Matter) and the number of medieval Jewish commentaries on it are surprising large as well. Here’s what most of these commentators thought …

According to Jewish tradition in the Midrash and the Targum, the book is an allegory of God’s love for the Children of Israel. In a Christian tradition that began with Origen, the Song of Songs is regarded as an allegory of the relationship of Christ and the Church, or else Christ and the individual believer. Both religions could not understand, so both clothed it in their own dogma. So we have this book in the Bible containing erotic imagery, no one really knows why it’s there but everyone knows it must therefore be important and have some special meaning, and because they don’t know the meaning they interpret it as an allegorical representation of the relationship of God and Israel as husband and wife.

Why can’t they interpret it? Because they have no cultivation gong-fu and spiritual attainments. No matter how brilliant a rabbi or scholar you are, or how profound your understanding of the Bible as a Christian, if you don’t have any cultivation accomplishments you’ll never understand this text. Its meaning becomes perfectly clear only when you start breaking through the conception skandha, and this is beyond most religious functionaries. The theme that it talks about happens over and over and over again once you reach this critical first stage of cultivation. As the Zen school says, cultivation only starts at this stage, at this point in time. Prior to this stage, if you never reach it then all your meditation work is in vain.

In Jewish thinking, the Song of Songs has even been suggested as a messianic text in that the lover can be interpreted as the Messiah. The Aramaic Jewish targums also interpreted the lover as the awaited Messiah.

Nonsense. If you don’t have any cultivation gong-fu or accomplishment you won’t know anything about it’s real meaning of transforming yin chi to yang chi, and thus the references to men and women. The Song of Songs is a cultivation text because it pertains to the physical transformations involved in opening up the heart chakra, transforming yin chi to yang chi, opening up other chi channels in the body, and cultivating through the conception skandha. That’s what it’s about. Let me skip to verse 5.2 which starts referring to the lessons I’ve been recently giving you, which is why I brought up this Biblical text:

2 I sleep but my mind is awake.

Listen! My beloved is knocking:

“Open to me, my sister, my darling,

My dove, my flawless one.

My head is drenched with dew,

My hair with the dewdrops of the night.”

 

3 I have taken off my robe-

Must I put it on again?

I have washed my feet-

Must I soil them again?

 

4 My beloved thrust his hand through the key hole;

My heart throbbed for him.

 

5 I arose to open for my beloved,

And my hands dripped with myrrh,

My fingers with flowing myrrh,

On the handles of the lock.

 

6 I opened for my beloved,

but my beloved had left; he was gone.

My heart sank at his departure. 

I looked for him but did not find him.

I called him but he did not answer me.

 

7 The watchmen making their rounds in the city found me,

They beat me, they bruised me;

They took away my cloak,

Those watchmen of the walls took my robe from me!

 

8 Young women of Jerusalem,

Swear to me that if you find my beloved

You will tell him I am sick from love.

 

9 Most beautiful of women,

What makes your beloved better than any other beloved?

What makes your beloved better than any other beloved

That you make us swear this way?

 

10 My beloved is dazzling yet ruddy.

The chieftest among 10,000 men.

 

11 His head is as the finest gold.

His hair is wavy, black as a raven.

 

12 His eyes are like doves beside the rivers of waters,

Washed with milk and fitly set.

 

13 His cheeks are like a garden of spices,

A garden that produces scented herbs.

His lips are like lilies dropping liquid myrrh.

 

14 His hands are disks of gold set with beryl.

His chest is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires.

 

15 His legs are as columns of marble set upon bases of pure gold.

His form is like Lebanon, choice as the cedars.

 

16 His mouth is full of sweetness.

Everything about him is desirable!

This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem

 

The phrase, “I sleep, but my mind is awake” is translated a number of different ways in the various renderings of Songs, but it basically means that you have attained samadhi. Only with samadhi can you undergo these transformative experiences, plain and simple. You’re aware but all is quiet, like night. The mind is silent but awake just as in samadhi. In fact, when you achieve the Tao you can even reach a stage wherein while sleeping your mind is just as awake as waking hours because it is clear. But here we’re talking about reaching samadhi in order to initiate these transformations. That’s why scholars cannot interpret this work.

Now here’s the main thrust of the work. This poem is talking about the opening of the heart chakra in the body as one penetrates through the conception skandha. The chi starts to penetrate the heart chakra and the chakra starts to pulsate, which is the throbbing in Songs 5.4. The chi appears white in color, like a dove. Over and over again I’ve told you that in practicing the skeleton meditation you want the chi to be visualized as dazzling white, as that’s what you’ll see when you reach this stage. So you’ll find a lot of refernces to the color white (milk, doves, etc.) and also to a ruddy complexion, for as the kundalini fire opens up the chi channels it restores color to the cheeks, which is a byproduct of the heat. Naturally as it ascends into the head it spreads through the head chakra channels so that the hair (crown chakra’s chi channels or petals) is “drenched with dew.”

So this is the meaning of Songs 5.2 – the heart chakra is opening, the chi is white, it’s ascending upwards into the head because the heart chakra is pumping it, and naturally the channels in the head start filling with this chi and opening. You can also think of the channels within the body as hairs, but the beauty of poetry is that we don’t know which one of these meanings was exactly intended – they both fit.

At this stage of attainment, I’ve previously explained what happens next. You’re cultivating and can see in your mind’s eye another body of yours which is the impure illusory body that develops after your break through the heart chakra and conception skandha. Yes, this is the impure illusory body of the Esoteric school, or Tibetan Buddhism, or tantric yoga. It’s a non-denominational process that it forms – it’ll happen to a Jew, Christian, Moslem, Buddhist, Jain, Hindu, Taoist, Tibetan Buddhist, yogi, pagan, agnostic or anyone who cultivates this far enough. Cultivation is just a technology of evolutionary yoga and this is what pops out of the process. To explain why we’d have to go into Buddhism again, but that’s too much for here.

Inside the sheath of this illusory body is blob of unrefined chi that has to be transformed. When the skin falls away from this blob, the chi inside looks like a lump of wiggling clear jelly. Even though this chi looks clear, it’s not purified but does become purified over time as you go through multiple stages of the following reefing process. The same thing happens for petals of chakras at early stages of cultivation.

When the chi inside the illusory body becomes full, the outer covering of the illusory body (which is the shape of your body, like a skin) drops away. It’s like the skin falls off, and this clear jelly substance (chi) is left there and then rises into the sky and departs. If you had to use an allegory, you’d say your robe fell off, or the curtain around a column dropped away, or one of a number of different ways of describing that a covering fell away. They’re all describing the same unmistakable process that happens not once, but over and over and over again.

You cannot mistake it for anything else, which is why this verse is so identifiable. I really cannot count the number of times this happens because the inner chi of this illusory body is being transformed. You cultivate, it fills with chi, when full the chi covering (in the form of your body) drops away, the inside chi rises and departs (like perfume or an aroma), and then you start cultivating and wait for it to start all over again at a higher, more purified level.

After awhile a new illusory body forms made out of slightly higher, more refined chi than last time that’s in the environment, and that’s how it becomes refined. Over and over again this process continues. That’s the meaning of Songs where it says the individual takes off their robe and puts it on again. They have to do this over and over again, and particularly work at sending the chi into their feet to transform it for as all cultivation schools note, it’s particularly difficult to get the chi to reach the bottom of the feet. In Taoism you cannot reach the stage of becoming an “Immortal” unless your chi channels to the bottom of your feet open all the way through. When that happens, Confucianism compares it to “Springtime.” At this stage the whole body, including the feet, gets transformed over and over again.

Next, the hand through the keyhole is a description of the chi running up the sushumna central channel and piercing the chakras, in particular the center of the heart chakra. I always tell you that you have to open up the heart chakra and I’ve taught you to use the Zhunti-Vairocana or Vairocana-Zhunti Tantra to do so which I’ve openly given on the MeditationExpert.com blog and in the site. But of course that tantra is useless unless you’ve first performed the preliminary work of the skeleton method and other cultivation techniques to prep the chi channels throughout your body for this to become possible. It’s all very scientific. It’s all just yoga that you have to aprior perform to somewhat open all the chi channels of your body evenly to finally be able to open the heart chakra.

The chi of your body runs right through the center of the heart chakra – which is the keyhole in this poem. It can only go up if you open the heart chakra, and when the heart chakra opens it starts to pulsate or throb just like Songs 5.4 says. The root chakra is also undergoing pulsation and sometimes the sex chakra at the back of the spine is contributing to the pumping as well in unison. But the main one is the heart chakra. If the root chakra of the cultivator is already unplugged then the actual words of the Songs of Songs in its original language might even be in the form of poetry matching the rhythm of the writer’s pulsation, but because I don’t know the original language I cannot tell. If so, it would truly be a “song” with rhythm and cadence corresponding to the pulsation pumping rhythm, and by reciting it in the original cadence it could help open up your channels as well.

So what’s happening to the rest of the physical body during this time? The heart chakra is pumping the chi throughout your meridians, and it even reaches your fingers and toes which become filled with chi, “dripping with myrrh.” But this process cannot go on forever. After a certain period of time at these initial stages, the pulsation stops, the chi recedes, and you have to wait for it to start all over again. Just as Songs says, the illusory body departs and disappears, and you cannot find it. It’s gone until it reforms.

It’s like when you really empty the chi channels in the toes of all the dirty chi. They seem to deflate, the skin covering falls away, and you have to wait for a new body to form while the root chakra has chi rise out of its center like a pillar to push all this garbage away. The process repeats itself in a similar but slightly different fashion at each and every higher stage of cultivation as regards transforming the physical and illusory bodies.

When everything disappears and there is a pause, through your thought born body you can see the Buddhas (other enlightened teachers watching over you) indicating that you just have to wait and should rest and do forget about it and do something else for awhile. All the meditation work in the world cannot make the new body form faster, so just let go and forget it. One Buddha might indicate this by letting you see that he’s crossing his legs and leaning against the wall while whistling (as if waiting for something), one might act like they’re reading a book and ignoring the rest of the world, another might show himself tapping his fingers on a table as if waiting … or some other image that communicates to you that you just have to wait as your chi becomes full again. Remember that the thought born body can only see, and cannot hear, so the Buddhas have to teach you with symbolic gestures like this and you always have to figure out their meaning. In short, your chi disappears, the illusory body leaves, and you just have to wait while a new body forms of higher grade chi, which is exactly the meaning of Songs 5.6.

This process will repeat over and over this way – the new illusory body forms, you continue cultivating emptiness and letting go (and never lose the semen at this stage), the chi becomes full, the covering (skin, robe, “body like suit”) of this illusory body drops away, inside you see a mass of clear jelly chi that floats away, and then you wait again….

We’ve just described the going ons of your impure illusory body, but what’s happening to your regular human physical body during this time? It’s undergoing tremendous transformation, what Maitreya Buddha called the “big knife wind (chi).” It feels as if every muscle, tendon, joint, and cell of your body is being cut up by the real kundalini chi as it pushes through all the channels and pushes out the filth to purify them. You feel sore, tired, beaten, bruised – just awful due to these tremendous transformations. It’s nothing you cannot handle or should fear. I’m just letting you know what to expect so that you don’t think you’re doing something wrong.

That’s really all you’re doing at this stage – purifying the physical body, which is purifying the illusory body at the same time. You’re turning your physical body into a Reward body, Enjoyment body or sambhogakaya because its chi channels are becoming purified. It’s becoming renewed. Because of these transformations everywhere you feel incredibly sore, as if beaten and bruised, and it’s hard to drag yourself back to your meditation seat to get started at this process again after you’ve rested. Sometimes you even feel like you might die, but you have to do this for all sentient beings. You must start cultivating again and when you do, after a short while of returning to your meditation seat you can start the circulation all over again and the feelings will subside. But this is what happens, and is exactly the meaning of Songs 5.7.

Another aspect of this process is the fact that your sexual desire becomes extremely strong, fierce beyond measure because the real chi of the body is coming up. Whether that’s the meaning of “sick of love” or not, the fact is that your real chi is aroused and the sexual desire is immense. The sexual desire is almost unbearable but like Shakyamuni Buddha warns, if you give in to lust you can never achieve this process in a million years, for it would be like steaming sand to get rice which can never happen. The longing for sex is incredible at this stage, and perhaps this fact is or is not reflected in this poem as well. Nevertheless, sexual desire will try to grab you.

The watchmen making their rounds in Songs refers to the chi circulating everywhere in the body, going through its orbits. Watchmen walk around town checking everything, and that’s a good analogy for your yang chi going through every nook and cranny of your channels pushing this and pushing that. Everywhere it goes the “big knife wind” is transforming all your tissues and cells, and in some cases you feel like you want to die because every part of your body is sore. Every part, and I mean every part! And yet you actually long for this as a type of pleasant soreness because you know this is IT, this is the transformation of the physical nature you need which will produce an internal beautified body, just as Songs says. Not one in a million, let alone 10,000 men achieve this.

When you are also transforming the impure illusory body into the pure illusory body this happens at a much, much, much later stage. That’s the “Afterwards 3×3” of the Wu-cho talk with the Buddha Manjusri which involves cultivating the very difficult space chi of the body. You can look that up on Google for the Manjushri / Wu-cho story. The space chi is very difficult to cultivate and purify, the most difficult of all. In Songs we sometimes see reference to spices, which are flavors, and this simply means the five flavors or five types of chi that are extruded out of the chi channels during this whole process! So that explains a particular aspect of this poem that scholars have never been able to figure out. This means the earth, water, air, fire and space chi which, being chi or winds, are also like aromas.

There’s another big secret that happens when you break through to the Desire Realm Skandha by breaking through the heart chakra. I’ve never spoken of this before but have to spill the beans because of what’s in Songs. A particular Buddha has made a vow to help people reaching this stage, and so appears on the wall of the chakra and demonstrates your major cultivation fault to you (ex. a tendency to violence, clinging to the dharma, etc.) by hitting you with what I call “golden poppies.” They look like special flower buds that just pound and pound upon you without escape. There’s no way you can run away from them, beat them or avoid them. A picture of Zhunti Buddha shows what they look like on the third hand down from the sword. Even if you can think of some way to escape for several aeons from them hitting you and pounding you in unison, you will not win in the end because they will catch up to you and you realize this without a shadow of a doubt. And so by this lesson this Great Buddha Master makes you realize you have no choice but to give up your bad habits in order to progress spiritually. He points them out using his pounding poppies, and it’s up to you to change your attitude and behavior.

At this initial stage he will also let you understand that mental “afflictions” are like black wasps that need to be killed on the path of cultivation. In Buddhism these are called “afflictions” and are symbolized as wasps or pests. When you are cultivating the pure illusory body, a different insect pest is used to demonstrate afflictions and is made of clear chi at a much higher level, so the lesson is repeated again even at that high stage, for afflictions are still present even then.

Lastly, after you make your initial enlightenment vows at this stage to crack open the base of the chakra and move its chi (this is a BIG secret I just revealed – TREASURE it!), the enlightened Buddhas will come one by one and brush your forehead with their hands anointing you. It will feel as if a cool breeze is brushing upon your forehead as they line up and do this one by one to anoint you, or give you this baptism. This is a genuine stage of empowerment, but as my Teacher says it’s still not the REAL one which only happens at the tenth stage Bodhisattva level when a practitioner is ready to become a fully enlightened Buddha.

These are actual experiences that will happen to anyone who opens up the heart chakra and breaks through the conception skandha, some of which are described in the Surangama Sutra or Lotus Sutra. If you want to know the details, you have to read these sutras. I’m sorry to tell you that no other school describes this in detail. It’s not that practitioners of other schools don’t reach this far. It’s just that these school leave no teachings or guidance, so for that you have to turn to the excellence of Buddhism, which is its specialty.

To cultivate the pure illusory body far past this stage (not the impure illusory body, which is described in Songs) is extremely hard, hard, hard, hard, extremely hard, extremely difficult hard, incredibly extremely difficult hard to do, and perhaps one day I’ll write about it. If I ever got hold of Nagarjuna’s Guhyasamaja commentary, which I’m told exists (if someone sends it to me I’d be happy to pay for it), I’m sure we could find some good material to comment upon so that I could give you some teachings to match. The Tibet school locks all these treasures up and thinks they shouldn’t be taught, but this shows their own lack of wisdom. In this day and age, this is PRECISELY the information that should be taught, and you should not need to be Tibetan to learn it. All cultivation schools have secrets, but this is not anything that can hurt you but something you should aspire towards. I’m giving you the excellence par excellence of the Yogacara-Vajrayana traditions.

At this stage of cultivating the illusory body you don’t talk about karmamudras anymore (tantric sex with dakinis, which incidentally might be a method the author used because of the allegories). Instead, to open up all the tiny chi channels in the crown chakra we must talk about making merit offerings. You can open them up by giving merit offerings to the Buddhas in a thousand different directions … you mentally point each chi channel capillary in a different direction and try to push out the chi as an offering. At this stage, it has to be useful to somebody. You can even use Hubble pictures of the many galaxies in the sky everywhere, and imagine a single chi thread extending to each of these realms to make offerings out of its mouth, if that will help. You imagine that the chi pouring out of these tiny thin channels becomes gemstones, medicine, ambrosia, gold, light, and all sorts of precious things you would want to offer to the Buddhas. At the stage of the impure illusory body – heart chakra opening, when the head chakra cannot rotate anymore you can imagine that you have tiny balls of chi and you spin them in a circle on the top of the head, like balls thrown on a roulette wheel, to get it to blaze with fire after it gets stuck, but that special trick won’t work at this very high level. You might have to create your own technique other than the one I created here for you with pictures of galaxies and extending the chakra petals (chi stalks) to make offerings to Buddhas.

You cannot achieve any of this unless your warm kundalini is activated, and it helps to stretch out the chi channels across the universe as you imagine this. If you visualize a flame at the front of the channel you can sometimes lead the chi out of the channel when it seems stuck inside. Typically a piece of jagged chi will get caught in each channel mouth, like a serrated triangle, and you often have to wiggle it free to get it to dislodge. If you practice breathing methods of holding your breath, like the 9-bottled wind, a tiny bit of pressure at your base can help squeeze the impure chi out as well. Typically in Orthodox Buddhism this set of purifications is done automatically just by anapana practices rather than through visualizations, and thus it still gets done without nay need of your guidance. So I’m actually explaining to you the stupid way because I’m a stupid type of guy. Nagarjuna actually expounded the Esoteric school for people who like science and think too much, and because of this bad habit of thinking I have to do something, which I don’t, I’ve fallen into this school’s clutches. Hopefully it’s to your benefit to know these things, but as Buddha explained, if you just let go and cultivate anapana breathing, you don’t have to know anything because ti will all happen of itself naturally. I just like knowing al the details.

No one has revealed these secrets ever before, but you will also find your own individual way to do it if you have the merit or a great teacher. Few people ever make it this far. These teachings are rare, but freely given. The Bible, as I’m explaining, recounts a bit of this but just a small fraction of the events, and isn’t telling you how to do anything. There are no instructions whatsoever, but this is in there because someone recognized that it is indeed a cultivation text. Otherwise it wouldn’t be there. The problem is that people just cannot decipher it.

Another way to open up the head chakra tiny chi channels is to cultivate the Anapanasati Sutra, just as Buddha explained, and concentrate on your breathing rather than illusory body visualizations. This is a different method than concentrating on form, and thereby bypasses the tendency for cultivators to cling to the illusory bodies. Frankly, it’s probably a superior method. Manjushri, Maitreya, Zhunti and Vairocana like to teach tantra, as well as some other Buddhas, but Shakyamuni does not like to as it’s not his high wisdom way. In any case, it’s very hard, very hard, very hard to open the crown chakra at the top of the head. It’s so hard you might not know what to do without a good teacher and it’s of particular difficulty to get the chi started moving there in the first place.

In order to open up the crown chakra and produce the pure illusory body, which involves working with the most rarified of the five elemental chi – the space chi rather than fire, earth, water or wind chi — you need to be making “offerings” and great enlightenment vows. That’s why I’m always stressing that you must make offerings to succeed in cultivation. The pure illusory body goes through many transformations and bodily shapes as it changes, and at several stages the head chakra main stem opens up, splits apart and out ascends a beautified Buddha form of many heads and hands like you see in the unusual pictures. This actually happens. The appearance is quite different than what happened and appeared as you produced a similar impure illusory body crown chakra emanation. On this I’m not going to give details.

So many bodies, so many bodies come out along this path! To explain all the steps in detail would take a book but whereas the breaking through the skandhas and generating the impure illusory body is easy to explain, though a complicated process. This second set of 3×3 purifications is almost impossible to describe with as clear an ordering. Frankly, you’re lucky you have what you have.

Everyone’s pure illusory body looks different due to their merits, the cultivation methods they’ve used, and their vows. The bodies produced are glorious and the process fascinating, not to mention tiring, but a certain stanza comes to mind from the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, which helps explain why Shakyamuni Buddha did not teach this method. No matter how much wealth in charitable offering or however many lives you offer in pursuit of the dharma, no merit is superior to a moment of true emptiness, the dharmakaya. Go read the Diamond Sutra and you’ll see what he says. It takes about an hour – you can find it on the web. So none of these bodies matter and are not worthy of clinging. They aren’t anything ultimate. They really are not the Tao.

Esoteric school proponents (Vajrayana and the tantric yoga schools) always think they have something marvelous that is missing from the Orthodox teachings, just as Jews and Christians and Moslems think they’re unique and special as well, but in the Diamond Sutra, Buddha also hinted at ignoring the Vajrayana process of transformation we’re discussion by saying that enlightenment is not found in a bodily form – whether a pure or impure illusory body. He said, “One who looks for me in appearance or pursues me in sound, follows paths leading astray, and cannot perceive the Buddha [enlightenment].” He also said “All phenomena are like a dream, an illusion, a bubble and a shadow. Like a dew drop and a flash of lightning, Thus should you view them.” Those are perfect descriptions of the illusory body. This is why Buddha disliked teaching these explicit tantric explanations, for as my teacher said, the big catastrophes in cultivation come from those who cultivate the Esoteric school and develop the habit of clinging to form. This happens in Taoism, tantra, yoga, Tibetan Buddhism, kabbalah practice, alchemical practices, nei gong and so on.

Although Shakyamuni said that making offerings of money, life, time and effort are not as good as attaining the Tao, nevertheless, you cannot succeed without merit, good deeds and offerings which is why I suggested that you donate a chlorinator ($265 for 3000+ people and it will last for 20 years – every day everyone in the community will use it as there’s no plumbing in Haiti) or whatever you can afford to www.haitiwater.org (the donate button is on their website) as it’s the biggest meritorious bang for the buck I can find for you. You need massive offerings like this to succeed in cultivation. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. My teacher always says the Esoteric school is extremely expensive because of the offerings required in order to succeed quickly.

In Songs 5.10 onwards, the author starts talking about the beauty of their illusory body and/or transformed inner chi body because this is truly a marvelous cultivation accomplishment. That’s why this Songs of Songs is in the Bible in the first place. Without achieving these attainments themselves, priests, pastors, preachers, reverends, vicars, rabbis, Torah scholars, Bible scholars, laymen, academics, intellectuals and non-cultivators won’t have a clue as to what it’s talking about. You can surround these people with a library of Biblical books and ask them to study, compare, argue and contrast, but thousands of years later they could never reveal this text’s meaning as we’ve done here.

That’s why I tell you that you always have to cultivate (meditate) to succeed in spiritual accomplishment. Ceremonies and rituals are useless, to say you are “chosen” or “saved” or have a “covenant” is ridiculous as well, to just study and take intellectual knowledge as the path is useless, to argue in debate is useless, to memorize is useless, and to become famous or rich through these means under the guise of religion is also useless. When I release my book on Christian cultivation it will certainly upset a lot of people but this is the truth – no practice, no attainment, no understanding of the inherent meaning of the texts. There is much in the New Testament, and Gnostic gospels as well, that speak of stages of cultivation, but the establishment will definitely not readily accept it. Okay, I’ve done my part for you in writing this. What more can I do but offer it?

Now by this time of practice the head chakra starts shining a bit with a golden light and as the chi melts off its surface, it drips down the color of amber honey. Dirty chi pushes out the sockets of your physical eyes and ears as the physical body transforms, a process that lasts days or weeks depending upon the cultivator. It pushes out of every orifice it can find, but you want to especially push it through the bottom of the feet and toes, as well as through the various chakra spoke channels (in the heart and throat and through the third eye especially). As it pushes out of these holes it’s like a snake, worm or living plastic because it feels alive and either exudes straight out, like a bowel movement, or wiggles out like a worm. Because it’s chi, or life force, you always feel like it’s something living.

When you reach this stage, you really should be in retreat so that nothing bothers you or interrupts the process, especially exposure to anything that might cause sexual desire. The sexual desire at this stage can drive you crazy, which is why Buddha told practitioners to practice in a graveyard watching the dead bodies rot, for that would help quell the desire. As the chi traverses throughout the body, it sometime gives off an aroma and the pituitary glands secrete a sweet saliva that you (or someone who kisses you) can taste. Thus, “His mouth is full of sweetness.” You should swallow this fully.

To elucidate upon this text further, which only cultivators who have achieved the requisite gong-fu can understand, the taking off of the robe and putting it on again refers to the outer covering of chi skin that falls away from the impure illusory body like a robe when you reach this stage, which is a particular stage of cultivating through the skandhas when you also begin to recognize the ching-se, or sentient matter. Summarizing again, throughout this stage, each time the outer covering of the chi body falls away, the jelly like chi inside is revealed, rises into the sky when its covering is gone, and a new body is instantly reformed. But this is only just a very rudimentary stage of gong-fu that initially occurs when working through the conception skandha. There are many, many steps to the process and these are just some of the first few. Because the physical body’s chi is transforming furiously at this stage, you feel sore all over every cell of your body. It feels like you are being cut up by what Maitreya Buddha called a “big knife wind.” Thus, it feels beaten, bruised and sore beyond compare. The Bible is only speaking about the start of this process and skipping loads of special phenomena, though I filled in some gaps.

At this time the chi is flowing through your body, including to your hands, and the heart chakra is pulsating to pump the chi through the central channel, like peristalsis of the intestines, in order to push the chi upwards to the head and throughout all the chi channels. After it reaches fullness, the illusory body’s covering drops away, it floats off, and your chi in your physical body recedes to rest. In Song of Songs 6:2 it says “My beloved went to his garden, to the beds of spices, to graze his flock in the gardens and gather lilies. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. He is the one who grazes his flock among the lilies.” This refers to the fact the chi returns to its root source, and mingles with the other chakras which the author called “lilies.” Later he says he had become like the “chariots of my noble people” which also refers to the fact that the chakras spin like chariot wheels. In the Jewish tradition, chakras are referred to as chariot wheels, such as in Ezekiel.

The whole point of this lengthy exposition is to let you see once again that the results of cultivation are non-denominational. The Jewish sages were also able to pass through this common experience just as everyone else does who reaches this stage of attainment. No people are special, no race nor religion nor creed nor nothing. That’s just the prejudice and propaganda of each group which it uss to help keep itself alive. So the Jewish cultivation stream is certainly not in any way supreme, and neither is Christianity, Islam, Taoism or even Buddhism for that matter. As I always explain, we simply use Buddhism a lot because it offers the most detailed explanations and clearest guidance, and we skip to other schools when their explanations are clearer.

Where is the guidance in the Bible for what to do? The most we know is that our Jewish forefathers, like Abraham, “went out into the field” to cultivate, but we don’t know what meditation methods they used. That entire cultivation line is mostly cut off. Vedanta doesn’t explain these stages either, and neither does Taoism but tantric yoga practices from India do explain things, though in a pollute manner. Yet what they explain is usually only the opening of the heart chakra, and not anything like this.

So unfortunately modern day rabbis, Christian priests, mullahs and other theologians will have no clue as to the meaning of these texts unless they meditate and start achieving the same states of spiritual cultivation themselves. Remember, the stages are non-denominational, no tradition is supreme. It will be very hard for Moslems, Christians and Jews to take up this road because of a resistance to the personal responsibility it lays upon you, and the fact that most rather think they have a special covenant with God, they are the chosen ones, only they will go to heaven, others are infidels, etc. etc. etc. It’s all unclear thinking which is why 99.9999999999+% of people in the world are not cultivating.

Furthermore, (1) most people of every religion don’t know the right way to spiritually practice (2) those that do know how to meditate or practice don’t put in the requisite time and effort with diligence and consistency (3) people lose their sexual energies without which this transformative process is impossible (4) you need a good teacher and merit for success on this path.

I’ve given you as many wisdom teachings as possible on our MeditationExpert.com site and in our books. What I really hope is that with more explanations you arouse the motivation to practice and lay a foundation for achievement so that you can succeed and help others. Now you know that the Bible, too, contains a bit of the story, just as it should. I never said otherwise, and you’d be surprised what’s in the Gnostic Gospels or how to interpret several of Jesus’s sayings in the New testament according to cultivation knowledge, such as “Jesus answered Nicodemus, “I can guarantee this truth: No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit.” But that’s for another day. So because I was explaining these stages of tantric development, I decided to pull in another cultivation school – Judaism – to show you the same stages explained once again. Whether it can help you or not I don’t know, but at least you have yet another teaching and something to think about as regards the Song of Songs. If you want to fill in the gaps, you’ll have to backtrack and read our blog posts and special articles on tantra, the central channel, chakras, the Zhunti-Vairocana tantra, and many other related posts since last December and early January of this year.

As regards the five skandhas, we can think of them as summarizing all the possible experiences of the mental continuum. There are five different types of things we can experience – forms, sensations, conceptions, processes, and consciousness itself. On the road of spiritual cultivation, you must learn to detach from the control of the skandhas by ceasing to identify with them. By refusing to be ruled by them, by detaching from them, this purifies them. Chi and consciousness are linked, so upon purifying each of the skandhas you are actually purifying a certain type of chi whose energies predominate with the influences or functions of what the skandha represents.

When one breaks through the conception skandha, it is equivalent to “seeing the Tao,” or “seeing the clear light” mentioned in Esoteric Buddhism, realizing non-ego as explained by Hinduism, achieving the selflessness of Christianity, seeing Truth or emptiness as described by Zen, the “shen transforming into emptiness” of Taoism, entering the Bodhisattva bhumis of the Mahayana path, opening up the heart chakra in tantra, Vajrayana and the Esoetric school, and many other correspondences mentioned by the world’s spiritual traditions.

You can cultivate the various samadhi without ever opening up the heart chakra but once you truly open up the heart chakra, then you achieve the stage of initial enlightenment or awakening we call “seeing the Tao.” As the Zen school says, if you don’t achieve this stage of practice, then all your prior cultivation work really accounts for nothing. This is what starts the Stage of True Cultivation Practice, or true cultivation path. Zen starts from this stage of seeing Truth, and then progresses on to the stages of cultivating realization and carrying out vows. So true Zen practice only really starts at a very high stage of spiritual attainment. It doesn’t start at samadhi, but at realizaing non-ego.

After opening up the heart chakra by letting go of thoughts and breaking through the skandha of conception, one can begin to cultivate the illusory bodies of Esoteric Buddhism, and the Sambhogakaya or Reward body. When the heart chakra opens, all the inner chi channels can start emptying themselves of a level of dirty chi that has collected and solidified over aeons. Buddha did not want people to get attached to this tantric explanation, so he simply called the process the “transformation of the five elements” since during this time you will see the dirty chi of the body exude out of the channels (through the portal of the third eye, throat chakra, heart chakra, bottom of the feet, through the toes, and so forth).

The physical body and chi body are truly transforming, so it is entirely a process of the purification of the five elements. However, the entire process occurs because of mind cultivation. It cannot occur without letting go, so Shakyamuni Buddha described the process in terms of mind to emphasize the mental aspect of practice without which none of this is possible. This was a brilliant teaching method, because as history has shown, otherwise practitioners tend to become attached to any descriptions of chi and chakras and channels and inner form, and thus inhibit their further cultivation progress because they cling to the cultivation of these as the path rather than recognizing it is all Mind-Only. When you cultivate form, you tend to get stuck to form. By emphasizing the cultivation of emptiness and wisdom, and letting form trasnfrom naturally, you tend to climb far higher on the spiritual trail.

As the dirty chi of the five elements pours out of the chi channels (the earth chi has the consistency of sand as it pours out the channels, the fire chi colors any other chi with a distinctive red [or brownish] color, the water chi is liquidy but when mixed with the earth element chi takes on the consistency of plastic, paste, vomit or apple sauce, etc.), one can also then unravel the coatings of dirty chi that actually entirely wrap or coat the chakras and inner chi body system. It is as if the entire chi channel and chakra system were wrapped with a coating of wax or plastic, and thus warping their actual shape. As the obstructions within the inner channels are removed, this outer wrapping can also be peeled away. But since the outer wrapping is tightly tied around the inner chi channel system, the unwrapping is more accurately described as an unwinding, unbinding or untying process. As the outer wrappings are removed, with each complete set of unwrappings a truer and more perfect shape of the underlying chi channels and chakra system is revealed. A psychic who thinks they know what chakras look like never sees their real shape because they never see people who have broken through the skandhas.

If take a plastic figurine and keeping dipping it in hot wax, over time it will become so coated with layers of wax that its original shape cannot be distinguished anymore. When someone therefore looks at the chakras of an ordinary meditator, what they think is the shape of the chakras is far different than their true shape after all these layers of chi have been stripped away. Thus, the original shape of the chakras is only revealed after all this dirty chi is stripped away from within the channels and from around them, revealing a structure of chi channels and chakras that looks progressively more beautiful and fully developed each time one progresses through a skandha. One needs to pull off at least three coatings of this chi before they can free themselves from each of the conception, volition and consciousness skandhas. There are a total of 3 x 3, or nine unwindings, before one is through it all, which is why Manjushri told the Zen monk Wu Cho “Previous to, 3 x3.” He also said, “Afterwards, 3 x 3,” but we won’t go into these higher stages of purifying the pure illusory body.

When one cultivates the volitions skandha, they will encounter the source of life and understand the meaning of yin and yang, or Shakti and Shiva, which they will see crackling around the surface of the cosmic birth egg of the sambhogakaya that had first formed from the heart chakra. It looks like an egg, but is a bit flattish at the top, and an esoteric body forms within. In the western alchemy schools and in Taoism, this outside differentiation of the true yin and yang forces, which you see for the first time, is called discriminating between yin and yang.

It is easy to become misled as one passes through this skandha, because in one’s imagination you will also see also sorts of images regarding the sources of creation and destruction in the world or universe, which are ceaseless processes that turn and turn and turn. The volitions skandha is forever involved in processes of ceaseless transformation, and at this level you can begin to understand the chi aspects of creation and destruction on a personal, worldy, and universal level. Thoughts arise and disappear and will ever continue to do so. The key is never to cling to what arises.

At this stage, the chi of the root chakra will seem as if enclosed in a crystal dome, and when this odd shaped dome pops off the wavering nature of this life force chi wavering across the mouth of the root chakra will be revealed for the first time. When one first passes through the conception skandha and opens up the root chakra at that level of practice, the pumping of the root chakra chi that is unleashed will cause the famous “Zen sickness.” When one cultivates through the volitions skandha and unplugs the root chakra at this layer of inner chi body, they will experience the Zen sickness again but at a more refined level of chi, and the same thing will happen again when they unplug the root chakra at the level of chi purification corresponding to clearing out the chi routes for the inner chi layers of the consciousness skandha. If you read any of the poetry written when an individual is at this stage, its rhythm and cadence will help open up your channels and transform your ether body, too. This is one of the reasons Buddha, Milarepa, and many Hindu sages often spoke in verse or “songs.”

Upon breaking through the consciousness skandha, one can reach a state of nonproduction, attain direct perception, and merge into the pristine crystal clarity of the original nature. It’s like there is no inside or outside, and two clarities merge into one another. Is this final stage of clarity permanent? We can only say after doing all this work that you have made a good dent in your cultivation by purifying the inner chi bodies and thus laid a good foundation for cultivation attainment. But to consider oneself enlightened is a mistake indeed. Much more work is to be done. Much more. You’ve only really started. At best you have purified your body somewhat and made it easier to cultivate your mind and behavior.

At this stage, you must continue cultivating now that the five elements have been somewhat purified, your inner chi body has been somewhat purified, and the layers of chi that enwrap its original structure have been stripped away. In fact, with each level of stripping you are unraveling the chi binding the most original etheric forms of the chakras, and while it seems you are unwrapping the crown chakra at each stage, you have not really freed that particular chakra from all the bindings until you really succeed past the consciousness skandha. This is a supreme teaching and supreme event of which little is known except to successful practitioners.

This is an extremely high level secret, including the fact that freeing the crown chakra from the layers of consciousness chi will cause a definite reaction in the environment. Each time you pull off these layers of chi you are disturbing the chi in the local environment, collapsing the castles and denizens of ghosts and demons. In the Surangama Sutra, Shakyamuni Buddha explained this, which is why they sometimes arise to oppose you. When you break through the consciousness skandha you will even feel a small earthquake in the entire chi of the surrounding area, but when you really pull the crown chakra out of these chi layers, which will happen much later, you will produce a gigantic response in the human world. This type of event is extremely rare, and it is because such individuals who have won their freedom can become cultural and cultivation leaders of mankind that such a ripple effect is felt that shakes the world. If a fish jumps out of a lake the surface of the water is broken to create ripples, and as you break free of the chi layers that form the world, the pulling to freedom creates reverberations in the world as well.

While this process of breaking through the three upper skandhas, or “three gates,” can take a short period of time, to complete the cleansing of the chi channels after one breaks through the five skandhas requires a much longer period. That’s why you go into retreat to cultivate the samadhi and the Tao. It is especially difficult to open the chi channels to bottom of the feet when going through this process. One is thereafter more mentally empty after all this unwinding, but old habits still arise and thoughts still arise. They’re just easier to mentally see so that a cultivator aimed at purification can better police themselves at changing their own behavior. The Buddha Samantabhadra said that the cutting off of old errors and the progression of gong-fu at this stage takes time and cannot be done away with all at once. The gong-fu proceeds step-by-step as it matures. What one has to do at this time is continue to cultivate the Tao and the various samadhi to lay a yet firmer foundation, and for this the Anapanasati Sutra is the top, top method used by the greatest Zen masters, a secret rarely shared. Breathing methods and prajna watching cultivation are key.

To break through these last three skandhas are what is known as the “three gates of Zen.” During this time, the Esoteric school says that one is actually purifying the illusory body, and in tantric parlance one is emptying out the chi channels and unwrapping the inner chi body of the layers of dirty chi wrapped around it, as if it were bound or tied to a covering. They describe the process as like untying a knot, though you could also describe the unwrapping of these outer chi layers as an unbinding or unwinding.

Not only will you be cultivating your inner chi body, but by progressing through the three higher skandhas you will also be cultivating the sambhogakaya, known as the Enjoyment Body or Reward Body. Upon breaking through the conception skandha you will see the chakra within this body that corresponds to the Desire Realm. It is royal blue in color with petals that are like a white wall because to Desire Realm inhabitants the color white is their concept of purity. It is upon reaching this stage that you attain the Bodhisattva bhumis and understand how the third is no different than the seventh, and the sixth is no different than the second, and so forth. To break the solidified chi resting in the base of this chakra requires a tremendous feat of will because of your Buddha vows, and without great vows of compassion and merit it is impossible to cultivate through this. Only great Buddha vows can break this chi within the chakra base, and the other enlightened beings will gather round to watch you and hear your vows when you attempt this. This is why I always tell people to imagine what they would wqnt to be able to do for the universe if they had miraculous powers like a Buddha, and endless time to devote themselves sin compassionate ways for living beings. What you decide to do is entirely up to you.

Upon breaking through the volitions skandha you can discern a smaller royal blue chakra that corresponds to the Form Realm. Its petalled wall is also royal blue, the same color as its base, because to Form Realm inhabitants, who abide within samadhi dhyana, their concept of emptiness is also like samadhi (a thought form) as well. Breaking through the consciousness skandha, the smaller Formless Realm chakra appears whose color is a bit grayish blue, the gray having a tinge of red or brown because of a subtle hate for existence that runs through the mentality of Formless Realm inhabitants. The wall (petals) here are transparent and clear because to Formless Realm beings, transparency is their concept of emptiness.

While this elucidates somewhat upon the tantric purification process of the Vajrayana or Esoteric school, in most cases the Esoteric school only explains all the processes we’ve covered by referring to the purification of the impure and then pure “illusory body.” The methods are considered secret and only available to someone who undergoes an empowerment or initiation, but even then the information you just read is never revealed. So this is the first time the descriptions of the various sambhogakaya chakras, as well as the different unbindings and unwrappings of the inner chi body, have been given. Not only are the descriptions freely offered, but you now have instructions on how the various cultivation school teachings, together with the skandha system and Vajrayana tantra are linked together. And in a bit you’ll see how they link to yet other teachings to reveal facts that have never been taught previously.

The samadhi you can cultivate at these levels of chi purification and chakra opening are much higher than the same samadhi you can cultivate without opening up the heart chakra and progressing through these purifications even though the first, second, third or fourth dhyana will reach the same heavens. And thus the Esoteric school claims that its four levels of the merging of emptiness and bliss, corresponding to each of the four dhyana, is different than the regular four dhyana. In effect they are the same, in effect they are different.

You can say this is true, and you can say this is not true. To be sure, an Orthodox, rather than Esoteric (Vajrayana or tantric) practitioner can also achieve these unwindings, so the same stages can be attained via either route. The same high stages of samadhi can be attained. You just need to know the method and teachings and put in the work. Furthermore, the esoteric and orthodox school dhyana will reach to the same heavens. Nevertheless, each of the four dhyana has a higher, lower and middle level of proficiency in attainment. It is more likely that one who undergoes the purification of the chi channels and chakras at this level, unknown to those who never open up the heart chakra to give them access to purifying the three upper skandhas, will achieve the highest levels of the samadhi attainments. That’s the meaning of the Esoteric school boasting that its samadhi are higher than those of the other cultivation schools. This boasting is not always true.

What is also important to note is that many practitioners who break through to see the Tao leave the world after this feat, and don’t stay to complete this tantric unwinding of the chakras in order to cultivate the sambhogakaya. They don’t stay in this world to finish transforming their physical bodies. However, you must do this, and cultivate all three Buddha (“emligthenment”) bodies (dharmakaya, sambhogakaya and nirmanakaya), if you want to complete the path to complete and perfect enlightenment. Since Shakyamuni’s time, perhaps a half dozen or so individuals have fully completed the whole sequence perfectly. Rememebr that “Buddha” does not mean “Buddhism,” it is just a highly respectful term that means someone who has become enlightened.

Another big secret that no one has ever revealed before is that the five skandhas actually correspond to the five koshas of the Hindu Upanishads which form the basis of Advaita Vedanta teachings. Here’s how that works.

For the rest of the article, clik on this link: Buddhist Skandhas, Hindu Koshas, Chakkras, Heavens, Samadhi and Enlgihtenment