I recently had a big Inner Alchemy “ah-ha” – sparked by the viewing of a couple of amazing video clips of scientist/mystic Gregg Braden. In an interview for a Louise Hay program, Mr. Braden talks about the relationship between thoughts, feelings and emotions, in relation to the practice of prayer and creative manifestation.

Our conscious thoughts – our visions of what we wish to manifest – are, Mr. Braden proposes, something akin to a quantum blueprint. These visions typically originate in the three upper chakras (crown, forehead & throat) or, in Taoist terms, the upper dantian.

While these visions, or prayers, might by themselves be quite beautiful and inspiring, they seem often to remain as just that: internal images or aspirations. But how do we actually bring them into existence within our material world? According to Mr. Braden, we do this by activating the feeling level of our Being, rooted in the lower three chakras (root, sacral & solar plexus).

Generating strongly-energized positive feelings about what we’re envisioning is the key to manifesting these visions. Once we’ve generated this energy - in what Taoist Inner Alchemy calls the Lower Dantian and Snow Mountain areas – we allow it to flow upward, at the same time as the vision-energy flows downward.

As these two energies meet within the electromagnetic field of the heart chakra (the middle dantian), the vision is infused with the life-blood of our feeling-energy – a kind of "immaculate conception" which births the vision into the manifest world ... [read the entire essay]

I often link to this painting by Alex Grey - called "Theologue" - because it illustrates so beautifully our interconnectedness with the entire world, the entire cosmos. Saying the same thing, in words, is David Loy's wonderful article "Loving the World as Our Own Body: The Nondualist Ethics of Taoism, Buddhism and Deep Ecology." In this essay, Mr. Loy uses an excerpt from the Daode Jing and a passage from the Sokushin-zebutsu fascicle of Dogen's Shobogenzo as grounding for his exploration of the relationship of Taoist and Buddhist practice to the insights of Deep Ecology:

"The reason why we have trouble is that we have a body.
When we have no body, what trouble do we have?
Therefore: he who loves the whole world as if it were his own body
Can be trusted with the whole world."

~ Daode Jing, verse 13

"I came to realize clearly that mind is no other than mountains and rivers and the great wide earth, the sun and the moon and the stars."

~ Dogen

There is much of great value and delight in this article, and I encourage you to take the time to enjoy it, in its entirety. With great skill, the essay weaves in and out of the implications of coming to understand, deeply, that "self" and "other" are really not-two. Having discovered this, we align with the insight expressed by the Buddhist poet/philosopher Shantideva: "Those who wish to bring themselves and others swiftly to salvation should perform the supreme act of converting others into oneself."

Myanmar (Burma) Needs Our Love

The people, plants, animals and land of Burma desperately need our prayers and any material assistance we are able to offer, after being hit by a devastating cyclone this past weekend. The UN World Food Program, UNICEF, International Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders are among the agencies accepting donations to fund the relief effort.

The most effective method of offering support - given the various diplomatic delays that these larger humanitarian organizations have encountered - is probably to donate to the International Burmese Monks Organization. The monks are able to use their grass-roots network of monasteries to offer assistance immediately.

The sage-king leaders of China's pre-dynastic era were known as the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. Among the Five Emperors, it is Huangdi - the "Yellow Emperor" - who is honored as the mythical father of Chinese Medicine. The Huangdi Neijing Suwen (Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic, Basic Questions) - the foundational text of Chinese Medicine - is rendered as a dialogue between Huangdi and the physician Qi Bo.

It is believed, by practitioners of some of the more esoteric paths, that the Yellow Emperor was an emanation of the Ascended Master Lanto - whose image above comes from a painting by Claudio Gianfardoni. Lanto is said to have developed the light in his heart to such a degree that it shone like a golden sun through his flesh.

What virtue means in the context of Taoist practice might be a bit different from what our minds normally conjure, when we hear the word "virtue." De (Te) has less to do with adhering to externally-mandated (religious or secular) codes of conduct, and more with allowing our actions to emerge from the spontaneous perfection of the Tao. Being virtuous, for a Taoist practitioner, is connected closely with the practice of wuwei: the mysterious "action of non-action."

What this means, so far as I can tell, is that our egoic will is surrendered to, or merged with, the "will of Heaven," i.e. the rhythms of the natural world, as they emerge from the Tao. Having thus surrendered, we gain access to an infinite Intelligence, which knows, spontaneously, what the "right" action is, in each and every moment. Learning to abide in this state of wuwei is obviously a process - whose perfection comes only in moments when we are manifesting our True Nature as Immortals.

The Virtues of the Organs

At the level of our human body, the notion of virtue is a bit different. According to the Five Element System, each of the major yin organs has what is known as its "virtue." This refers to an emotional state that expresses when the energy of the organ is balanced and free-flowing. So, for instance, the virtue of the Liver is kindness, and the virtues of the Kidney are wisdom and a child-like wonder.

The most well-known of the Baxian - the Taoist Eight Immortals - is Lu Dongbin (also spelled Lu Tung-Pin), who is the patron of Neidan. As befitting an Immortal, Lu Dongbin's early life was filled with auspicious events. At the moment of his birth, for instance, the room was filled with a wonderful fragrance. Lu's life, however, was not without its difficulties. Twice he attempted to pass a top-level civil service exam, but failed. Yet, befitting an Immortal, this failure was transformed into the greatest of gifts. The story of this transformation is known as the "Yellow Millet Dream."

In the story, Lu Dongbin meets up with an old man who, unbeknownst to him, is his destined teacher, Zhongli Quan. The young Lu has just put on a pot of millet, to cook. The old man takes out a pillow, and invites Lu to take a nap. As he sleeps, Lu Dongbin dreams that he did indeed pass his civil service exam, rose to fame, and (in certain versions of the story) married a beautiful woman, with whom he had wonderful children. But then, in the dream (in certain versions of the story), he is accused of crimes, loses his position and all his wealth, is betrayed by his wife, and his children die.

When he wakes from this dream - in which he had lived an entire life, rising to fame then descending into poverty and despair - he discovers that his millet is not yet cooked. The insights born of this experience lead Lu Dongbin to become a disciple of Zhongli Quan, and enter the path of the Tao.

Modern Immortal

This month marks the first North American visit by HH Karmapa - the leader of the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. Tickets are still available for New York, New Jersey and Seattle public teachings. Here's an opportunity to meet someone who is considered to be a living Buddha - a modern-day Immortal.

Cosmology

awash with birdsong and the scent
of blossoms - trees
squeezing out lime

green leaves - neither the crescent
moon nor
the morning star

hesitate to submit
to this late April dawn
this gradual

rising that births
through shimmering
petals of light every

living thing ...

Pretty much every religious tradition - modern science included - has a cosmology: a story of the origin of the universe, of how it all began. I find these fascinating to explore: the "Big Bang" theory, God breathing ripples onto the surface of the lake of the World, Yang Qi and Yin Qi emerging from the Tao - to name just a few.

If we shift our focus from the very large and abstract to the more immediate, we can consider "cosmology" in terms of the creation of our moment-to-moment experience. How is my world created - or how is it that I create "my world" - from breath to breath, or thought to thought, within the various fields of my perception? And if we shift our focus again, to the really small, we could ask the question: in their essence, what are the various things of my world made of? And here, again, the answers vary widely: from quarks to qi (chi) to Pure Consciousness to strings - to name just a few.

Finding a connection between cosmology in its largest sense and in its most micro sense has of course become the Holy Grail of modern physics. In support of their search for a unification between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, physicists build electron accelerators and spend long hours working out mathematical formulas. For practitioners of Taoist Inner Alchemy, these various experiments - acceleration of electrons, explorations of the eleven dimensions, etc. - all take place within the laboratory and elegant universe of our precious human body.

One of my favorite things to do, when I was in acupuncture school, was to practice copying the Chinese characters for the names of the acupuncture points that I was learning. My calligraphy was not so good, but nevertheless it always felt wonderful to do this - as though there were something in the character itself - a treasure-trove of vital information - that wasn't in the English translation.

Later, when I began comparing English translations of the Daode Jing, I was faced with a similar issue. With translations varying so widely, how could I hope to gain access to the full potency of the original? And how could it be that a single text could give rise to such a dizzying array of interpretations? In the introduction to his translation of the Daode Jing, Jonathan Star offers this explanation:

"Ancient Chinese is a conceptual language; it is unlike English and other Western languages, which are perceptual. Western languages are rooted in grammar that frames events in real time, identifies subject and object, clarifies relationships, and establishes temporal sequences. Ancient Chinese is based on pictorial representations, without grammar. Characters symbolize concepts that can be interpreted as singular or plural; as a noun, a verb, or an adjective; as happening in the past, present, or future."

The result of all this is an extreme flexibility of meaning, for each Chinese character - a meaning which ultimately is determined only by the textual and social context in which the character appears. Hence, the seemingly infinite possibilities for translating the Chinese characters comprising Laozi's Daode Jing into the English language.

Is there any hope, then - for those of us unable to read the text in its original langauge - of accessing the true meaning of the Daode Jing, or other Taoist texts? The answer I've most frequently (and thankfully!) received is that yes, this is indeed possible. How? Through practice under the guidance of an authentic teacher, which offers the possibility of entering the non-conceptual terrain out of which the original was born.

May we all succeed, brilliantly!

The twelve main and eight extra meridians define the energetic anatomy within which practitioners of Chinese medicine operate. These are usually what is being referred to, within Taoism, by the word "mai" or "meridian." The Taoist art and science of Fengshui is also rooted in the capacity to perceive flows of energy, in both natural and architectural settings - similar to the way an acupuncturist perceives the flow of qi through the meridians.

But what exactly are these meridians through which - according to Taoist practitioners - life-force energy flows? Joseph Campbell once remarked, with his characteristically wry sense of humor, that "you won't find them on the operating table." If, with our conventional vision, they can't be seen, then how do we know that they exist?

It has been proposed that the earth herself has a meridian system: an energy grid composed of ley lines, which function in much the same way, with respect to the planet, as the meridian system does with respect to the human body. Putting these two systems into relationship gives birth to a vision of the human body and the cosmos interconnected in countless ways along such "channels of awareness" - an idea reflected in the Buddhist/Hindu image of "Indra's Net."

Which leaves unanswered, still, the question: how do we know that these meridians actually exist? The answer given by Taoism is that it is through the practice of qigong and meditation that the ancient sages were able to perceive these subtle structures - and that we also, by practicing, can enter this same magical and natural terrain.

All intimately connected to: getting along.

For a fascinating presentation of Taoism's relationship to ecology, have a look at James Miller's article, posted at Harvard University's Forum for Religion and Ecology. Mr. Miller points out that while the principles of Taoism are of course rooted in the rhythms of the natural world, they don't always fit neatly into contemporary ecological frameworks. Taoist practice is based upon the assumption of a "mutual interpenetration of all dimensions of being, with the body as the most important field for the interaction of cosmic forces."

In this view, powerful transformation and healing of the elements begins by re-visioning them as they appear within our own bodyminds: "In such an understanding nature is not something outside of us to be dealt with after the fashion of a mechanic repairing a car, but is both a mental attitude to be carefully cultivated and the true condition of one’s body that contains the infinite dimensions of cosmic reality within itself."

Subway Shaman

Among the "dimensions of being" taken seriously by Taoist practitioners are those inhabited by the spirits of particular landforms. If we desire to alter these landforms - say by constructing a building - spiritual courtesy requires us to ask permission of these spirits, before proceeding. If we fail to do this, there can be negative consequences, for both human and nonhuman inhabitants of the particular place.

In this video report, we see a Hmong shaman performing a ritual to appease the spirits of the land upon which a new subway was built. Similar rituals - echoes of the shamanic origins of Taoist practice - are performed also by Taoist priests, and can be understood as one aspect of "Taoist ecology."

Want to nourish your brain, supporting its countless functions, in countless ways? From the perspective of Taoist Inner Alchemy practice, the best way to do this is by building the energy in the Snow Mountain center.

The Snow Mountain area is located at the root of the spine, directly in front of the tailbone. In Hindu yoga traditions, it is this same location that said to be the home of the kundalini - a potent energy that lies dormant, coiled up like a snake, until awakened by yoga practice. In Taoism, this energy is understood to be vitally important not only for our spiritual process, but also for our physical health - particularly the functions of the brain.

The Snow Mountain area is the source of four important meridians: the Du (Governing Vessel), the Ren (Conception Vessel), the Dai (Belt Channel), and the Chong (Penetrating Vessel). These four meridians belong to what are known as the Eight Extraordinary Meridians, which are the body's deepest reservoirs of qi.

A practice offered by Dr. Zhi Gang Sha to nourish the Snow Mountain area, is to imagine - in this area in front of the tailbone - a very hot sun shining down on a snow-covered mountain. As the snow melts, a gentle steam rises up to nourish the brain, and any other part of the body that you direct it to. This beautiful visualization activates, simultaneously, the water and the fire aspects of the Snow Mountain area. Enjoy!