I got another e-mail from the Micheal Winn guy again with some more interesting ideas from Chi gong. One is a standing meditation where you ‘breathe’ in from your heels, breathing in all the qi from the earth, everyone else, universe, etc. to root your connectedness, and then expand the inner smile outwardly to embrace the all. I liked that. Here are some excerpts from his newsletter:
Excerpts from Dissolving the Heart-Mind from Michael Winn:
What does it mean to dissolve the heart-mind, and why would Daoists even want to do that? The simplest answer is that the heart-mind has become rigid or dysfunctional in some way, and this obstructs the free flow of qi within the individual. In the medical model of dissolving the stuck patterns using acupuncture, herbs, or massage, the qi can flow more easily, improving both mental and physical health.
In the martial model, repeated training of the heart-mind using movement supports the qi to be expressed more powerfully in relation to others.
In the spiritual model, excess fixity of the heart-mind may obstruct the unfolding of ones spiritual essence or moral power (de). Heart-mind rigidity prevents exchange of qi between the individual as microcosm and the collective macrocosm of Nature and Humanity. Zhuangzi advocates getting rid of the mind of everyday life (sheng zhi xin) in order to fly on the wings of the Dao. So dissolving the heart-mind allows spontaneous change to happen between the individual and the environment. The dissolving process is a spiritual prerequisite to cultivating a wu wei attitude of openness that promotes effortless change, a fundamental value of Daoists.
Standing forms of qigong are more challenging, as the mind is forced to wait in stillness and give up its impatience to physically move, while it is simultaneously challenged by gravity. What happens eventually is the qi within the vertically aligned body begins to create micro-movements between the poles of Heaven and Earth. This produces an energetic detoxifying effect that gradually intensifies and breaks up old heart-mind patterns. Standing still also allows the ordinary mind to observe and release tension within the layers of the body’s vital organ and muscular-skeletal structure, which in busy everyday life it would not do.
……
At higher levels of practice, it goes far beyond standing empty-minded, using the vertical stance to absorb qi from the earth into the heels, which is then circulated in the Microcosmic Orbit. The historicity of this practice dates back to Laozi: The Sage breathes through his heels. The standing method of dissolving is also useful in resolving ancestral issues stored in the bone marrow and blood. In Chinese theory, many heart-mind imbalances may in reality be ancestors seeking expression and completion. (Winn 2003)
…. The Inner Smile is a method of dissolving this false outer layer of the heart-mind and opening the spontaneous spiritual joy of the inner heart (ling), perhaps best translated as soul……
In my own teaching I began adding a yang phase, i.e., reversing direction, and radiating from the heart a smiling wave beyond the body. (Winn 2003) This yang version of the Inner Smiles embraces everything outside the body, layer by layer: ones aura, the room, ones family, village, one’s enemies, the country; the planets, moon, sun, stars, and the blackness beyond. Smiling outwardly to ones community and natural world offers a context for unconditionally accepting ones worldly destiny. The adept then flips this perspective, reversing again the direction of the flow of acceptance, smiling through layers of the outer world back into the physical body. Finally this smiling wave dissolves back into the pre-natal formless sea of qi in the dantian.
Zuowang practice helps the adept to surrender to the impersonal qi-field of heaven and earth…… In zuowang the emphasis is more on process, on cultivating spontaneity and openness to ever-changing currents of the qi-field. The dissolving of the heart-mind is achieved by allowing each thought, feeling or sensation to manifest without resistance, and then surrender it to the larger flow of the qi-field to be creatively transformed…… Zuowang means to forget the myriad projections, it consists in cutting out all delusions and firmly fixating ones mind. Once the mind is firmly fixated, there is nothing beneath it but the One, and nothing above it but emptiness. It will never stir, even when it is shaken.
Both Chinese medicine and neidan theory map out these forces below as the yin-yang and five phases qi-flow that regulate the heart-mind. They are the vital organ orbs of the heart, spleen, lungs, kidneys, and liver and their partners the bowel spirits who comprise the twelve officials. They behave much like real politicians and bureaucrats. Collectively their job is to regulate the heart-mind, yet paradoxically they embody the very patterns of resistance and corruption that need to be dissolved when they block healthy change. But the heart-mind lacks the will to completely dissolve itself. Thus the deeper level of ling or soul must first be accessed. This view of the soul is becoming increasingly popular with modern Daoist healers in the West (Sha 2006).
In the Daoist alchemy model the human ability to concentrate qi to dissolve obstructive patterns in itself doesn’t require perfection or absolute emptiness of mind in order to be successful. Dissolving is a process, not an end goal or fixed state. The heart-mind needs enough integrity to hold the center while absorbing higher cosmic forces, even if it is not yet physically, morally or spiritually perfected. In fact it may be the very flaws in the adepts heart-mind that guide the alchemical method of internal refining that is most successful.
They now smile on behalf of the Dao, radiating a feeling of unconditional acceptance from the primordial qi-field. This smiling radiates a neutral force that lubricates the yin-yang qi flowing in all dimensions of Heaven, Earth, Humanity, and personal heart-mind.
This is a merger of the sages personal heart-mind with the mind of Dao. It implies that humanity’s highest destiny is to elevate Heaven and Earth with its purity of heart and the unique human ability to feel personal love/acceptance of the myriad beings. For Westerners, the Inner Smiles heart-centeredness and unconditional openness offers a bridge between Daoism and Christian teachings of unconditional love.
In this light, dissolving the heart-mind in all of the models considered is not meant to get rid of the heart-mind, but to replace the old patterns with a more expanded, all-embracing mode. The dissolving process is designed to make the heart-mind pliable enough to respond to the qi-field, thus empowering it to serve the Dao of Humanity in its ceaseless creativity and self-exploration.
From a later newsletter: ‘Chi flow’s naturally’ a newsletter by Michael Winn:
ChiFlowsNaturally@HealingDao.com
“The Tao is very close, but everyone looks far away.
Life is very simple, but everyone seeks difficulty.”
Taoist Sage, 200 B.C
“Western science and medicine could be considered a form of external alchemy: ingenious at transforming matter and producing a surplus of magical technological goods, yet unable to fill human hearts.”
You can order this “must have” Internal Alchemy book in the “Top Taoism Books” on his website: www.healingtaousa.com/tpp/blk7.html is the product page.
Large passages from his newsletter on the new book he recommends above:
Preface to Internal Alchemy Book
This book brings together the leading scholars in the field. It gives a thorough and easily accessible introduction, with a survey of cultivation methods that form the backbone of internal alchemy. It presents the major schools and discussion of key concepts, such as mind, inner nature, and destiny.
Other chapters focus on the emergence of spirit through the top of the head, the activation of internal visions in Thunder Rites, the sexual commingling of energies in duo-cultivation, body visions and techniques employed by women, contemporary alchemy in China and its transmission in the West. It concludes with comparative studies on Kundalini Yoga and Hermeticism.
PREFACE by Livia Kohn & Robin Wang
“…..The goal of internal alchemy is to identify, control, modify, and eventually transform subtle energies as they are present in the human body-mind. As scientists in biology and medicine increasingly come to see the body as an energetic system, a “living matrix” made up of bioelectricity and bioenergy, Daoist neidan has an important contribution to make.
Neidan can inspire and guide theory and practice in rapidly developing new fields, such as energy medicine and energy psychology. The only obstacle to integrating millennia of traditional Daoist knowledge and experimentation into the modern discourse is the lack of accessible presentations on the subject. That is changing with this volume”.
Read entire preface (3 pages). Click on: www.healingdao.com/cgi-bin/articles.pl?rm=mode2&articleid=91
What’s Inside this book? Table of Contents
Internal Alchemy: Self, Society, and the Quest for Immortality
Livia Kohn and Robin Wang, Editors
TABLE of CONTENTS
1. Modes of Mutation: Restructuring the Energy Body -Livia Kohn
2. Internal Landscapes – Sara Neswald
3. Neidan History and Early Lineages – Guangbao Zhang
4. Southern School: Cultivating Mind and Inner Nature – Xichen Lu
5. Neidan Methods for Opening the Gate of Heaven – Stephen Eskildsen
6. Summoning the Thunder Generals & Internal Alchemy – Shinyi Chao
7. Numinous Father and Holy Mother: Duo-Cultivation Practice – Xun Liu
8. Female Alchemy: An Introduction – Elena Valussi
9. To Become a Female Daoist Master: Kundao in Training – Robin Wang
10. Daoist Internal Alchemy in the West – Michael Winn
11. Kundalini and the Complete Maturation of the Spiritual Body – Stuart Sovatsky
12. Western Parallels: The Esoteric Teachings of Hermeticism – Althea Northage-Orr
note: (…) denotes where original text has been cut. Original text is twice as long as this excerpt.
Daoist Internal Alchemy in the West (abridged chapter)
by Michael Winn
The Dao is very great, for it offers human beings 3,600 pathways. Each pathway has 10,000 methods to help us become who we truly are. — Daoist saying
In 1980, I was introduced to Mantak Chia in his tiny office in New York’s Chinatown. A friend had alerted me his energy was “off the charts,” and looking for a writer. A 36-year old Thai Chinese Daoist, Chia made his living doing energetic healing. Dr. Young, a Chinese MD with an office next door, sent Chia patients with difficult diseases Western medicine could not cure. Many recovered their health (Young 1984). I had never met a Daoist. “What do you teach?” I asked Mantak Chia. “Immortality,” he replied without hesitation.
I looked at him skeptically. I was into Kundalini yoga, at the time still an underground culture. My yoga friends and the popular Indian gurus of the day only talked about enlightenment. “In China we have records of many hundreds of immortals. In the West, they only talk about one: Jesus,” Chia added, as if his cultural boast allayed my skepticism.
I took the bait, and signed up for the first class ever offered to Western students, on the Microcosmic Orbit. Chia warned me it was only “kindergarten” in the One Cloud system of Daoist internal alchemy. I later realized the Orbit was the piece missing from Indian Kundalini yoga practice, which directs all qi to flow up cakras located in the fire channel of the spine, then out the crown. The Daoist approach re-circulates Heaven-qi back down the crown into the water channel in the chest, connects to Earth-qi at the perineum, then spirals it back up the spine. The Orbit turns the human body into a refinery of whirling qi mixing fire and water qi.
Within two years I was practicing One Cloud’s second formula, Lesser Water and Fire, in which the qi moves into a third neutral channel, the Penetrating Vessel in the center of the body. The fire and water qi are sexually coupled and an alchemical elixir forms. It created a wonderfully warm glowing feeling in my body, unlike any of the many other spiritual practices I had experimented with.
Thus began a lifelong journey in which I became an adept, teacher, scholar, and witness to the unfolding of neidan culture in the West. In addition to documenting One Cloud’s Seven Alchemy Formulas for Immortality spread widely in the West by Chia’s Healing Tao organization, and other streams of Daoist alchemy in the English-speaking West, I will address two other issues.
One: how is Daoist internal alchemy tied to Chinese culture and language? Has the appropriation of neidan resulted in different insights or experiences by Western adepts, who may cultivate energy bodies differently from Chinese adepts? Two: are immortals real, or merely a Chinese cultural projection of a deep human desire to survive death? If immortals are real, are Western adepts in contact with them?
Western Growth of Alchemy
In 2008, twenty-eight years after my meeting Mantak Chia, yoga and Indian notions of enlightenment had surfaced into mainstream American culture, with 12 million yoga practitioners and glossy magazines. Numerous Hindu and Buddhist centers of meditation had flourished, died, and been replaced by new ones. Daoist internal alchemy had emerged from its “doesn’t exist” status, but was barely visible on the cultural horizon.
Its biggest presence was the thousand Healing Tao instructors Mantak Chia had certified globally in at least the first formula of One Cloud’s neidan system. In 1980, Chia planned to write a single book. I ended up editing or co-writing his first seven books. By 2008 he had published thirty-three books and dozens of videos….
Oriental healing schools have proliferated. Many are aware Daoist neidan gong, or “skill with the internal elixir,” is considered the pinnacle of self-realization and healing in China. Why don’t they teach neidan? The training is not well understood, and its complexity and long progressive work make it difficult to commercialize in the alternative healing market. There is an acupuncture textbook Nourishing Destiny: The Inner Tradition of Chinese Medicine, inspired by Zhang Boduan’s Four Hundred Words on the Gold Elixir (Jarrett 1999). It highlights neidan, also translated as “internal medicine,” as the highest distillation of Chinese medical principles….
Chinese alchemical literature is fascinating but maddeningly obscure. It wears two masks simultaneously, one promising mystical illumination and immortality, the other promising a spiritual science that systematically bridges the dark gulf between a fragile human mind in a mortal body and the vast eternal life of the cosmos. “Spiritual science” implies a practicality especially attractive to Westerners. Scientific materialism has become a de facto standard of truth often pitted against religious faith. Neidan offers a bridge between the two.
The Process of Alchemical Transmutation
Daoist alchemy seeks to reconcile the creative tension between impersonal nature and the personal human. It simultaneously embraces the mystical oneness or primal chaos of Dao, expressed by an all-penetrating primordial qi-field, and many individual bodies, each with a unique destiny, arising within that field. External alchemy can help heal individual human bodies, but cannot deliver the experience of oneness or chaos. Death and disease could be seen in this context as unconscious ways to return to oneness.
Neidan seeks to achieve this return consciously, by embracing the life force at its deepest level of ever-changing process. Western science and medicine could be considered a form of external alchemy: ingenious at transforming matter and producing a surplus of magical technological goods, yet unable to fill human hearts.
Neidan serves to speed the completion of both personal worldly destiny (ming) and the realization of one’s spiritual essence or inner nature (xing) arising from the impersonal origin. What distinguishes Daoist neidan from other forms of meditation is that it traditionally involves the creation of a dan. This is variously described as an elixir, pearl, or egg in which the adept’s worldly and spiritual destiny are integrated.
This elixir or pearl is a vessel for the highest authentic essence of a human, a lifetime of wisdom condensed into a single spiritual drop. It’s vibrational purity and integration of spirit and matter is what survives death and allows for spiritual immortality. The elixir is progressively cooked or refined internally with different methods and goes through different stages.
In One Cloud’s Seven Alchemy formulas, the first popular neidan system in the West, primal Water and Fire are caused to merge with each other in an explicitly sexual internal coupling. This union of yin and yang is an alchemical marriage of inner male and inner female. The adept gets “spiritually pregnant” and forms an immortal embryo in the belly center or elixir field (dantian). This births an immortal child in the adept’s core channel, which progressively moves upward. It matures over many years into a sage or immortal at the solar plexus, the heart, third eye, and crown.
The inner sage may achieve different levels of immortality – human, earthly, heavenly, full celestial, or complete merging with Dao. Different yin-yang forces are coupled at each level; male-female sexual coupling evolves to a purer level, i.e., becomes sun-moon coupling, and continues into humanity collectively coupling its soul forces with planetary and star beings.
These levels may be understood as metaphors for the evolution of human consciousness beyond its mortal limitations. After physical death, spiritual immortals merge into the vast ocean of cosmic consciousness but continue to evolve and create within the greater process of Dao. Physical immortality is not the goal; that would be too fixed and thus not aligned with an ever-changing Dao. Soul immortality would be a mid-level achievement that results in conscious re-incarnation on earth, such as is used by Tibetans to preserve their spiritual culture.
Daoist rebirth is a long, gradual process, in which the adept moves inward by stages, refining the polarized and corrupted qi of postnatal after-Heaven (physical plane) into the balanced and purified qi of the prenatal stage Before Heaven, a middle plane that holds all possible forms waiting to birth. The adept finally penetrates to the pure field of the original energetic trinity of primordial origin.
This is the full return to original being, a merger with the cosmic egg or gourd before it cracked open. In some cosmologies, beyond this primal egg lies the Daoist notion of supreme mystery or Unknowable Ultimate (wuji), the source from which the primal trinity of the qi-field arises.
(carol here – I did not read the whole book, but found these excerpts quite interesting, and his Inner Smile meditations have been helpful to Bill)