Let’s continue our discussion of experience along the path. This is the fourth video on the subject.

The NeiJing Tu Book

Somewhere along this timeline, I was asked by the publisher Singing Dragon to write a book on the NeiJing Tu - the Diagram of the Inner Realm - and Daoist Inner Alchemy.

A couple of interesting experiences fit into this discussion. When I was first asked, I had a good window of time to dedicate to the task and made good progress. I was coming up on finishing it, working away, sitting on the floor with a stack of books four feet high. This entire stack fell on my computer and knocked out the hard drive. I was unable to retrieve the data.

A year or so later, after essentially writing it again and improving and deepening my understanding, I came to see it as an intervention.

The Appendicitis Experience

The book journey was not yet complete. Later, I was on retreat for a couple weeks trying to finish the book (and also study with one of my teachers). I was staying in a cabin in the woods in Virginia by myself.

I started to feel uncomfortable in my body. I thought, “Pain is simply another sensation. I’ll forge ahead and accomplish this task.” But then I started to be unable to eat and keep it down, and finally, days later, unable to drink and keep it down. My discomfort was increasing, so it started to seem serious.

On maybe the fifth day of feeling uncomfortable, I realized I had crossed a threshold that was unwise to cross. Following my wife’s sage advice, I tried to get myself to a clinic, to a hospital. It was very remote and rural - the phone didn’t really work. I was in a lot of pain and didn’t have much energy.

You can see already the context of yet again the finishing of my book being interrupted through an apparent intervention - or perhaps coincidence. But what is coincidence?

I drove myself to this clinic that was maybe 30 miles away. It took all of the resources I had developed in my years of living to stay on the road. I went probably half the speed limit, just trying to keep going. I made it, and then I managed to make it to the window. Through a confusingly casual conversation with the clerk, she came to see the extremity of my situation. They got me into an ambulance - they couldn’t handle the severity at that clinic. They rushed me to a University of Virginia-associated hospital.

It turned out that my appendix had burst and I was going into sepsis. All of my organs were filling with fluid and getting hard, and I couldn’t breathe without pain. It was all very serious.

The Near-Death Experience

It sounds extreme in the context of appendicitis, but at some point in the hospital, I think I started to depart, to cross over, to let go into another realm.

The story is of contextual interest because of this intervention aspect, and then this near-death experience. In a very dream-like, otherworldly, other-realm experience, I was floating up toward light and beyond in a cloud-like, mist-like realm, and three angels appeared at my side and held my hands.

I don’t remember now if there was explicit communication, but it was very clearly nurturing, caring support. At that moment, there was a question of “what next, what now?” As I surveyed my inner landscape, I felt very clear that I needed to be there for my son. My daughter was not yet born.

So I came back. The angels brought me back and then were tangibly - I could feel them holding my hands - with me in the hospital room. I made it through. They didn’t even take out the appendix. They said it was necessary, but according to my research, it was not. With a nutritional IV and antibiotics, and I made it to the far side.

The near-death experience, and the experience with the angels, I think is relevant and interesting in this mystical experience context.

Spirit Interventions and Karmic Patterns

There’s also this interaction of, as I perceive it... I had a shaman friend once confirm to me that two different shamans at different times suggested or confirmed that these interruptions in the book writing were spirit interventions - perhaps the reiteration of a karmic pattern from the past in which another iteration of this coherence of being was somehow persecuted, if I remember correctly, for expressing themselves, for expressing myself.

It’s an interesting way to think about it, and a way that one might think about these apparently outlier but apparently meaningful moments in life that lead you in one direction or another, where there seems to be a turn, a pivot, a change.

Seeking a More Devotional Path

When we left off in the last video, I was talking about how an awakening experience led to the desire for a more devotional relationship to practice, and at the same time, a desire for more explicit relationship with a teacher or a tradition, explicit dialogue about awakening itself.

In Daoism and in my teacher’s way - Master Wu’s way - this discussion is not necessarily approached head-on. Though I talked about what I was experiencing and was met with quiet acknowledgment and respect, it wasn’t filling out that conversation in the way that I felt I needed. I don’t think it’s necessary - this is just what was shaping my choices.

Studying Bön Buddhism

I came upon Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, a Bön Buddhist teacher, and the timing of the initial retreat and the Dzogchen cycle was fitting for me. Everything came together and I began studying in the Buddhist tradition. It’s a really beautiful tradition that I came to care for, respect, and become devoted to very easily, naturally, and quickly.

It also turned out to be a way into devotional practice in general. The structure of the practice includes prayers, meditation, physical practices, and energetic practices - lots of things I was familiar with, but with this additional layer of prayer.

Ngöndro Practice

In these traditions, when you begin - or sometimes you may repeat later - there’s a series of practices called ngöndro , which are foundational practices to prepare you and ripen your mind and energetic system for both awakening and the development of that awakening.

In these traditions, the introduction to the natural state, the awakening to things as they are, is at the beginning. It may or may not become apparent at that time, but that is when one receives it from the teacher.

The ngöndro comes in different forms in different lineages with different teachers. This one was a nine-part ngöndro with a prescription of 100,000 repetitions of each of these parts. So it might include, for example, an eight-syllable mantra repeated 100,000 times, counting with mala beads as you go. Or, it might be a physical practice like a series of mudra, or prostrations.

I didn’t complete it. I got about 650,000 repetitions into it. What I remember that was left to do were some prostrations and the 100-syllable mantra, which was quite long compared to the others, and one other.

Somewhere in here my daughter was born and my time availability changed, and life went in other directions.

Mystical Experiences During Ngöndro

But I’m sharing all this because I got far enough along in this recitation and deep immersion - essentially around-the-clock practice (I wouldn’t make great claims about my sleep practice, but it’s okay sometimes) - that it led to another round of mystical experience that was interesting and significant.

The most pervasive was a re-entry into the sparkling world, the radiant world, where all the granular parts of Being were luminous and vibrating all the time. I think that is one of the great benefits of this immersive retreat-style practice.

There was a time during this period in which I was seeing very detailed, fabulous mandala, gold and radiant, in sacred spaces or in nature.

These are interesting experiences that give a practitioner insight perhaps into the source of more manifest versions of these things, like in sacred paintings. These patterns are naturally emergent along the path.

This pattern of practice included prayers to begin, and then either non-meditation meditation (seated), or energetic practices, and then would resolve in prayer as well. It gave me access to, or a place for, my devotional instinct or drive to go. It held that devotion very naturally.

Returning to Daoism

In the end, I found that Daoism was still my home. If you think in terms of past lives, I think there’s probably overlap with both paths, but the weight of the Daoist path in me felt stronger. I was open to any possibility at the time, but that was where I arrived - back home in Daoism.

Ordination at Parting Clouds Temple

Then this opportunity to connect to temple-based lineages arose. First, the Parting Clouds Temple, QingYun Guan. I went there with a couple of Daoist brothers in 2018 or 2019, and we were all ordained for the first time.

Master Huang was an interesting teacher and had a lot to give. We didn’t get specific scriptural training. There was a talismanic healing tradition that he was passing on, and it included recitation of incantations especially, to activate and set the ground for the practice of drawing and giving talismans for healing.

Healing Experience with Talisman

I had an interesting experience. I’m going to let this video run on a little bit because I expect it to be the last for a while in this category.

When we went to the Parting Clouds Temple, I was mysteriously weak. I had a cloud of Lyme-like symptoms. Generally it was a fatigue and weakness that I hadn’t been able to resolve through my own practice. So while we were there, I asked for help from Master Huang and he agreed.

The dormitories at the temple were in disrepair, so we stayed at a hotel down in the nearest town. Master Huang came over one night. His method of diagnosis was to turn the lights off, perceive your qi body - it takes 10 seconds or so - turn them back on, and he’s got an idea of what to do.

He said, “I have two talismans I want to give you. Come tomorrow before we study. I’ll show you these talismans. I’ll make them and you can consume them.”

Consuming them in this case: they’re written in cinnabar on yellow rice paper. You then burn the talisman, letting the ash fall into a bowl of water that is then energized with that universal pattern. Then you consume the ashes and the water in three sips.

So I did this. The diagnosis was that a yin entity was clinging on. I took these talismans, we went about our day of study, and came back to the hotel.

Before, the fatigue was extreme - I couldn’t mow the lawn at home, there was too much effort. Walking through the airports to get to China, I’d get out of breath just walking on flat ground.

I got back at the end of that day. Our rooms were on the fifth floor. I was feeling good and I wanted to test the feeling. So I sprinted up five flights of stairs. Everything seemed perfectly resolved.

It was an interesting experience of this particular form of energetic healing.

The Complete Reality XuanWu Lineage

We were ordained there in the Complete Reality Quanzhen XuanWu lineage. XuanWu is the Dark Warrior, also known as ZhenWu. He was the 36th incarnation of LaoZi. 36 is complete yin - six times six. Six is a yin number, nine is a yang number.

This lineage is focused on talisman healing and cultivation.

Returning to Dragon Gate Caves

During that trip, the translator connected us to Master Huang. He was flipping through some pictures from when he had been at a Daoist conference recently - a national gathering in China. There was a picture of Master Zhu, my abbot friend from 2008.

I had a startled, strong reaction. “I know him! Can you take me to see him?” My spoken Chinese is not sufficient to travel on my own or to connect andreceive teachings.

That’s how it all came together that I was able to return to the Dragon Gate Caves and be ordained there. While the Parting Clouds ordination was special to me, the Dragon Gate connection was like coming home.

I think I described those experiences, the temple experiences, in another video already. When I first went, the experiences in the cave... the first thunderstorm of spring happened on the day I was ordained, including leaving some snow on the mountain. There were lots of beautiful synchronicities.

I don’t think there are more stories in this context to share from that journey.

The Arc of Experience

So why don’t we leave it there? It’s a lot to think upon. As we think about an arc of experience over the course of practice, at the beginning there are these sudden changes, maybe dramatic experiences - whether it’s saliva that tastes like honey, or that sudden awakening-style experience, the pulsing of the chakras. These are markers along the way.

Then I found, while there are moments of mystical experience that stand out from the others, the main thing happening is this persistence of a layer of clarity. I think this is the mirror experience that is with me all the time and has the opportunity to gradually massage out my misunderstandings, my perceptual misunderstandings of duality.

My access and direct understanding has improved over time. As much as I think I understand the feeling and state of things-as-they-are, the conceptual relationship to that does seem to develop and deepen over time.

I hope that mapping of experience is interesting and useful. Take care. See you soon.

Let’s continue our discussion of experience. This is the third video - please watch the first two beforehand.

The Mysterious Leg Injury

When we left off, I talked a bit about painting and discovering alchemy, about things that emerged that seemed out of place. Around this time, I got a mysterious leg injury that appeared to be neuropathic in some way.

My right leg, from the hip down, fully shut down. There was no feeling, no muscle, no ability to move the muscle. It literally happened as I was walking in the park. Suddenly I had to sit on the ground - I was walking with a friend, and the leg just shut down.

I was able to get a Western-style analysis - MRIs and X-rays - six months later. They couldn’t find anything wrong. I was in my mid-twenties. They were saying, “You have the spine of an 18-year-old, nothing pinched, nothing.” So it remained mysterious. I came to think of it as a path correction.

The Foundation of Hot Yoga

Leading into that, I had been doing hot yoga - 90-minute Ashtanga-based yoga classes in 105-degree heat, every day for four years. I mention that because I think it was an important physical restructuring, an important physical foundation.

The Daoist tradition, every enlightenment tradition, has practices to build this foundation. I had not yet discovered Daoism and my resonance with it, and this was a great practice. I was extremely healthy and strong and flexible as a result.

I think it’s important to mention that often people have a habit of dismissing the practice that led to a pivotal moment. You practice Zen for 15 years and have a sudden awakening and say, “Oh, that Zen was... all that sitting was irrelevant. The awakening simply happened.” That’s a speculation that’s hard to agree with. There was a clear foundation.

But I couldn’t practice when my leg didn’t work. I suppose I could have in a modified way, but it interrupted my practice.

Encountering Master Wu Zhongxian

It was right about this time that I had encountered Daoist alchemy on that webpage I mentioned, and I was also reading about it in a Shaolin martial arts book. It was all new to me, confusing. What is qi? What is energy? What does all this mean? But I resolved to heal myself by moving in this direction.

At the same time, I had the good fortune to encounter a book - the first book in English by the person who would become my teacher, Wu Zhongxian. I had a very clear response to his voice in the book. He was teaching in the States at that time in week-long intensives - two tracks, a Tai Chi track and a Qigong track, but really just teaching Daoism through these forms.

So I went, and the resonance was as clear as I had anticipated. I felt a very clear, sudden commitment - a kind of light-switch commitment to the practice.

Intensive Practice Begins

I began practicing immediately: two hours in the morning, two hours in the day, two hours in the evening, and sometimes two hours in the middle of the night.

Much of this practice was seated or standing forms where you have a mudra, a mantra, and a visualization, and then often text and/or talisman to support the understanding and integration of the dynamics of the form.

Because Master Wu’s transmission was bright and full, and because the forms were ancient and full-spectrum authentic teachings, and because I practiced them so intensively - these things are my understanding in retrospect - I had dramatic experiences relatively quickly as all these things came together on top of the foundation I had built with physical yoga.

The Tangible Experience of Qi

The first experience I want to mention was very simple — one that some people have without any introduction — and that is simply the tangible experience of Qi — of energy.

You feel it between your palms, you feel it moving through your body. During this phase, I was able to see it. Because it’s common and at the beginning of the path, sometimes we don’t fully appreciate the consequences of this experience.

But really, if you let yourself integrate the understanding that you have a very clear, tangible, repeatable, shareable experience of an invisible force and semi-material viscosity of being - it’s a big deal. It’s different than how we see the world. It’s different than the table we sit at, the chair we sit in. It’s different than the nail we hit with a hammer.

This simple experience can really change the way you see if you let it, because reality is different than we at first perceive. For me, the repeatable experience of feeling and moving Qi started to open my mind and reshape my understandings.

Luminosity and Altered Sleep

During this phase of deep immersion in study and practice — that amount of practice has a retreat-style intensity and immersion, but it was in the midst of life. Between practices I continued making paintings and having shows and all of that, going about life. It wasn’t a very social time because there wasn’t much energy for that.

But there was a pervasive feeling that accompanied this intensive practice: luminosity in myself and in the world around me, an almost sparkling encounter with reality.

During this time, I had a long phase during which my sleep/wake pattern became a continuity where it was as if one was the other, and vice versa. I would lay down to sleep and I would be vibrating with energy, and I would not feel as if I slept or that I lost consciousness at all through the night. Then as I moved through the day with energy - I clearly had the rest I needed - I experienced life as if I was asleep, as if I was dreaming.

It’s hard to explain sufficiently well, but it was a very clear continuity of an apparently altered state, and yet it felt like it was actually a more real state. It lasted some months. It was a really remarkable experience, and one that I wish had been, in a way, just the state of being from then on. Sometimes I have thought of it as potentially a window of a future more integrated state. That would be fun if that were the case. But it definitely changed the way I relate to my waking consciousness to have had that experience.

The Sweet Liquor of Long Life

After that experience, I had another experience that is mentioned in the scripture or the alchemical poetry now and then, which is “the sweet liquor of long life.”

It lasted for a year or more - my saliva changed to be particularly smooth and viscous and tasted like honey. My mouth tasted like honey all the time. My understanding is that that’s a certain stage of the refinement of the energy.

Like all of these changes, they are surprising when they first arise, and then eventually they get more and more subtle, and they integrate and dissolve into your everyday, into your normal being.

Activation of Energy Centers

That was also true of an activation of all the energy centers. I say activation - what I mean is the experience of each of the energy centers, not just the three DanTian (lower, middle, and upper) that we relate to and practice with in Daoism, but all the other - I’ll say chakras, because that’s how we commonly think of them.

So it was outside of the tradition I was practicing in, but in any case, all of my chakras were... they weren’t spinning. People talk about them spinning - that wasn’t my experience. They were all expanding and contracting in a very dominant-in-my-experience way as I moved through the day.

These things correspond to things we read about in the scripture, the stories, or the alchemical poetry - in addition to being enjoyable and interesting of themselves. The tradition, as I received it through Master Wu teaches: don’t get tangled up in the experiences, let them be. I followed that advice, and I also enjoyed the changes as they came and went.

Sudden Awakening with The Secret of the Golden Flower

It was during this time that, late one winter night, I was reading a translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower. This was the Thomas Cleary version. I’ve said elsewhere - I think in the video on transmission - I felt like I received a transmission from this text in spite of its errant translation.

I would in no way suggest that Cleary lacked knowledge of Chinese, but perhaps his relationship to it was one of less respect than I would be inclined to give it. Or maybe not. In any case, I was reading this translation of The Golden Flower and had a sudden awakening.

It was like a lightning bolt. It was like a really loud clap. I didn’t hear thunder, so it wasn’t quite like thunder-lightning. It was almost like two pieces of wood slapped together - a clear clap-clack, but really loud - ringing in my ears. All of my perceptual world was replaced with expansive bright white.

I’m not sure how long it lasted — I was by myself — but probably not long. I was sitting in front of a fire, and, to my recollection, the fire hadn’t burned out.

As my perceptual world reassembled itself after that experience, I had a feeling like shock — “What happened? Where am I?”. Then there was this clicking into place that had happened in my mind, and aspects of things that I had read in scripture and poetry flashing in front of me with this new understanding.

It was maybe two in the morning. Until the sun came up, and then I think in the days that followed, I was flipping through scripture with the feeling that I suddenly understood in a direct, non-cognitive way. It was a remarkable experience.

Beginning Translation Work

I was also during this time reading alchemical poetry in translation, and I was realizing - I could hear the meaning behind it, but I could see that the translator was not getting it or getting it across. That was when I started to translate.

That was a very slow-building process, piece by piece. I didn’t speak Chinese at the time. It’s an interesting experience to have. It evoked in me a different quality of devotional relationship to the path.

As you can tell from my story so far, I was fully committed. But there was a different quality after that to the awe and wonder and profundity with which I related to the path, the scripture, and now Reality.

My learning from Master Wu didn’t include much prayer, altar, ritual practice in that way, and I felt drawn to practice in that way. It was then that I became very clear about wanting to be ordained and have a formal relationship to the path, in addition to my lineage connection and practices through Master Wu, which were hermit lineages.

Visiting Sacred Sites in China

Early on in my study with Master Wu, I went to China with him and other students, and we visited many sacred places that left a lasting impression.

One was the tomb of Wang ChongYang, who is the founder of the Complete Reality lineage. The tomb is in a place that I think is not publicly known - at least that was my understanding when we went to it in 2008.

We went to this particular temple and knocked on the door for quite a long time. It wasn’t a planned visit. They eventually came and opened the gate and welcomed us in. To my knowledge - sometimes it’s confusing in translation - but as far as I could understand, they were explicitly saying that we were the first Western visitors to have this opportunity.

It was wild. It was this underground tunnel. I don’t remember the doorway to get in, but it was under the temple - not marked by any signage or anything, just a secret place. Like in some Dan Brown movie, there was this arched tunnel built with stone, damp inside. Walking through you eventually come into this a small domed room with a plain stone tomb.

In this tomb, Wang ChongYang completed his transformation, his realization. As the story goes, he lay in that tomb for three years and then came out. If I remember correctly, he communicated with students around him and then transcended. I may not remember that exactly right. But there was a very palpable feeling being in this room with this stone sarcophagus.

The Dragon Gate Caves

We also went to the Dragon Gate Caves Temple, which was founded by Qiu ChuJi, student of Wang ChongYang. That is the temple at which the Dragon Gate lineage was founded. There are beautiful cliffside structures built around the caves. Apparently for thousands of years before Qiu Chuji, there were masters cultivating in these caves, but he took over the temple, or took over the community, and later built a temple there.

Genghis Khan, who was a student of Qiu ChuJi, funded the initial temple development in all of China. There’s a stone there that marks the spot where they sat and discussed the teachings. His conversion was credited with saving thousands of lives, as he became oriented toward peace and harmony after that. It was late in his life.

The Dragon Gate Caves Temple made a deep impression on me. I had a natural connection with the abbot - just joyful easy connection. Master Zhu would hold my hand and try to feed me, just a nice connection.

In one of those caves, the Three Immortal Caves, we practiced as a group, and I practiced on my own a couple of times. The space of that cave, the energy of that cave, left a deep impression that was very present in my meditations during this time I’ve been recounting today.

Visions of Masters and Immortals

After this sudden awakening moment, the connection to this place was very active, and the cave itself, in my dreams and visions, began to be populated by masters. As I would sit in meditation, I found I was in the Three Immortals Cave, sitting in a circle of maybe a dozen masters, immortals, and get bright light transmissions from their eyes. Especially the one in the center directly across from me, which I understood to be a combination of all of them.

Around this time I began to perceive immortals outside myself, outside my mind, sitting in the room with me. There were three of them. They would sit to my left, to my right, and in front.

I rarely had dialogue like talking to another human, though I think that’s part of other people’s experience. But these were more shapes and presences and intuitive telepathic transmission of understanding, but often just presence and company and support. It was a very interesting, deep, productive phase.

As I was teaching - I was starting to teach at this time - I felt very much as if they were guiding me through intuition, and sometimes through the physical feeling of them being inside me, shaping the teaching and shaping my understanding as I studied and translated.

Wrapping Up

All of these things were leading toward a more devotional relationship to the path.

I want to share all of this, again, with the orientation that, although your experiences will be different, these categories of experience are either already a part of your life or will likely be, if you have a committed relationship to any path. This is one I know works, but of course there are many paths up the mountain.

I’m happy to share those things. I appreciate you staying with me during this extended video. I’ll see you soon.

Let’s talk a little more about experiences along the way. I want to reiterate that my orientation, my relationship to both the experiences and to sharing these experiences, is with the understanding that they can help inform our dialogue with reality, our relationship to ultimate reality.

If we give ourselves permission to extrapolate, to follow to the ultimate consequence an experience that we have - before, during, or late in the spiritual path - it is important work to do insofar as it can change the way you see and understand.

I’m sharing my own experiences with an eye toward allowing you to recognize in your own experience certain moments that may have been outside of the normal current. These moments, if acknowledged and given the proper status in your array of information, can get you closer to understanding things as they are.

This is part two - you can look for Mapping Experience Part One to begin at the beginning.

Direct Intuitive Knowing

When we left off, I was describing my experience of time as space. Now I want to turn to an experience I had especially in my teenage years - really all of my teenage years - and then maybe it was integrated in such a way that it became less surprising to my own understanding.

That was a direct, intuitive knowing of specific details about a person - about their past, about their preferences like a favorite color, or details about the person they were in a relationship with, or details about their childhood.

I ended up rationalizing this to myself as a processing of data that I was unaware of taking in - as intuition, a pattern recognition. People who looked this way or walked this way or wore this thing, or had a certain gesture or facial expression or something subtle, would have a strong pattern overlap with a person whom I had known well in the past. And if I transposed the details, it would turn out that much of that was right.

I think that was, on the one hand, accurate. But on the other hand it was an outside-of-time-and-space direct knowing that has implications for what time is and what space is and what individuals are.

I think this is actually a relatively common experience. It’s along the same lines as a déjà vu experience, but one which is maybe more common and harder to write off - you know these details, and when you test your theory, it turns out to be accurate.

So that’s just a window into one of these things.

Visionary Poetry and Channeling

Another category was a visionary type poetry in which I would get images, or I would often let the rhyme guide me to what words came next. I found various surprising things. One would be using words that I had never heard or read, but that would turn out to fit well in the context as if I had, and often point to a surprising insight. This was a kind of unintentional channeling.

But then, more concerning from the perspective of the time, was foreshadowing things that would later happen. I don’t suggest a causal relationship, but merely an outside-of-time-and-space perception. This is easy to understand in a way, once we are shuttling to and from this timeless, stateless state that includes all time and all space and the detailed perception from this node of being that we call the individual.

In terms of channeling, I think I will return to it later because it becomes a little bit more explicit in my internal experience later on.

I once had the rather strange confusion of seeing a blockbuster movie that was psychological in its nature, and then having the very clear feeling as if I had written it. Of course, this had no basis in reality. But there was some kind of merging of identity. It could have just been a sleepless delusion, I don’t know. But it feels to me like it fits in this conversation.

Again, I mean to bring up categories of experience in which you might recognize your own experience and then have the opportunity to follow them to their consequence.

Painting as Fields of Being

In college, I became a painter. My mode of painting was to paint these fields of being. It was a mode arrived at intuitively, but most likely influenced by reading Heidegger and “fields of being” was part of his lexicon.

Given how much it resonates with how I now understand and experience the world - from having made some progress on the spiritual path, and in this long arc alchemical project of integrating recognition and following it through to its consequences, or allowing it to mature and ripen to consume all of my perceptual experience - seeing things as fields of coherent moments, particles of energy... in retrospect, that feels like a spiritual insight.

How might you translate that into your own experience? Here is one possibility: any category in which you’re engaged in creative production, especially one in which you successfully feel like you’re getting out of the way - you’re “in the zone” in modern language - you feel like something’s coming through. We can relate to those almost as if somebody else created them, and like it’s a teaching we can respect and integrate in a different way.

Discovering Daoist Internal Alchemy

As a painter, as my painting developed beyond college... I have a first-principles orientation to whatever I do. So I was returning to the oldest manuscripts about painting and materials and mediums. In this context, I encountered an overlap of painting history and medicinal and alchemical orientation to materials - how they might transform from base mineral to luminosity based on specific treatments.

This was the direction of my research when I first encountered Daoist Internal Alchemy. It was not an obvious thread to pull on at the time. I encountered it via this magenta website with text written in all caps - not something I was inclined to take seriously. Still, it was the initial surfacing of this idea that would become central to how I practiced and experienced.

So that is a category of experience in which we can learn to listen to the things that seem out of place that arise in our view, in our screen, in our surface experience. These things are worth teasing out, with the understanding that we are incubating a future understanding.

Encountering the DaoDe Jing

Around that time I first encountered, at least in a serious way, the DaoDe Jing. Reading it, I had a feeling of remembrance and recognition and total synchronicity - an overlapping of pattern with the worldview, the philosophical view that I had developed through poetry and painting.

This included fields of being, and the inability to state something with clarity and certainty without the acknowledgment that it was a temporary functional statement, not one that held or conveyed the meaning itself - because that was elusive and disappeared when bound by a word or a mark on a canvas.

I used to call them “bridge fictions.” That is to say, something that I will state now in order to get from here to there, but with the understanding that it can never be all of what is meant. To draw meaning is a form of elision - it operates by virtue of leaving out. So it can never be the whole picture, fundamentally.

The next video in this series will start to encompass the experiences that I had while practicing intensively for the first five years of my serious spiritual practice, in which I was doing active energetic practice for six or eight hours a day. That led to a lot of mind-altering experiences. But even then I didn’t fully integrate those experiences as much as I could have.

To reiterate the purpose of these videos: to give you the opportunity to reflect on experiences you’ve had and see them as windows into the real.

See you next time.

This initiates a series in which I talk about my own experience and how I’ve come to understand that experience. My goal is to give you the opportunity to recognize episodes of your own experience in terms of the development of consciousness — the dissolution of delusion — and to suggest that there is a right relationship to experience in which one is neither making too much nor too little of one’s own experience, and in which one allows the experience to change their perception and understanding.

Life as Cultivation

I want to reflect first on some experiences before arriving at Daoist cultivation or any formal cultivation. There is a sense in which simply living life is a form of cultivation. Maturation, if embraced, is a form of cultivation. We put lines around it and it becomes a sharper tool when we follow a particular path, but it is something that we do if we’re paying attention, and sometimes even if we’re not.

The Volleyball Experience

I may get some of these out of order, but some experiences that I had growing up that I would later come to think of as relevant in this development of consciousness include a moment when I was playing volleyball on a team in high school.

There was nothing special about the moment externally. I wasn’t under-slept or over-slept. There was vigorous exercise in a stimulation-filled environment - a loud reverberating gymnasium, squeaking shoes, dripping with sweat. At the moment in question we were gathered around the coach between games.

Suddenly, my optical perception shifted to a sparkling granular field. This was before the movie “The Matrix” came out, but it was quite a lot like streams of binary information and a dissolution of distinctions, so that it was really just... it was a little bit like those black and white or grayscale apparent static images where if you focus just right in the middle distance you see a form. It was like that, but without needing a particular focus - the bodies of my teammates and the space around them became this relief of granular form.

Then it passed. I think it passed sufficiently quickly that there was no obstacle to functioning in that context, but it was a very clear perceptual change that made an impression and stuck with me.

Rock Climbing and Cessation

Some other moments in adolescence include moments of which I experienced repeated iterations. In one case, while rock climbing — I was focused on rock climbing between the ages of 15 and 25, and more sporadically after that — I had this recurring experience: when I began to climb, I would have a disconnect or a dissolution. I only came to know this experience in retrospect. That is to say, after climbing a full pitch, I would try to recall - in order to communicate to my partner down below where I’d gone, what choices I’d made, what they might need to know - and I couldn’t recall anything that had happened from the moment I started climbing to the moment I got to the top of the pitch.

There was this full absorption, union, lack of time and space. It happened regularly, almost every time when I was climbing a lot and climbing well. I think it was amplified by being high off the ground. I would have a gap in memory, in continuity of self, between the beginning of a pitch and the end of a pitch. A pitch is a section of climbing - might take ten minutes, might take an hour - and I would experience this absence, or as I came to understand it, full absorption.

The first experience, the volleyball experience, is a perceptual change that can happen as a result of prolonged deep meditation. Prolonged in a single session, but more likely - at least in my 30s and 40s - continuous many days of whole-day focus on the practice can result in this sort of perceptual change in which everything is vibrating and alive, and even the air is viscous in its way, has form, and things are merely a variation of density and vibration.

I’ll circle back to that, because during my life as a practitioner, there are other instances that may be of interest. But this cessation of experience during rock climbing, in retrospect, is very interesting. Had I had context and understanding to allow that experience - maybe a cessation and restart of the perceptual world - I think it could have had the alchemical transformative impact that it later would when I encountered the same experience during meditation.

Seeing Time as Space

I’ll add one more thing to this section: a visionary experience, which is to say an experience that was different than before and after, in which I saw time as space.

In this case, I did reflect on it a lot. It was maybe my mid-twenties, and I was trying to understand the implications if one were to take this perception to be real and true. As it has come to fit the way I see things later in my life, I see it in retrospect as an accurate perception.

I came to see time as space. I was looking out across time in relief, like a landscape. Oddly, it was a little bit more like a cityscape than a mountains-and-rivers landscape. But the physicality of time and the fixedness of time as I looked forward or back can have real implications on how we understand our experience of the world. I later read a book on “block time” and felt this articulated a model that fit my experience.

Making Sense of Outlier Experiences

I don’t want these videos to get too long, but I want to introduce those pre-practice, pre-cultivation experiences in order to give you the opportunity to make sense of your own experience - even if you are in this phase before committed practice - in terms of the development of consciousness and the potential of these outlier experiences to change the way you understand reality.

I’ll continue to add installments in this narrative of experiential development, in order to map my own experience in a way that I hope is useful for you, and to map a progression of experience within cultivation. It’s often productive to locate yourself within that territory.

That’s it for now.

Alchemy is a word that is often used casually, but it’s worthwhile to have a precise and rigorous definition.

On the one hand, alchemy is a description of processes that you could say, transforms a base material into a pure and refined material, for example, lead to gold.

Or you might say it’s a sequence of processes that is simply a purification, where we are removing impurities to arrive at the essential core purity, at the base of being.

The English word comes from the Egyptian tradition. We use it to translate the Chinese words NeiDan 内丹. Dan means cinnabar, literally. We take it to mean elixir. Cinnabar is this bright red substance that has some real world attributes, but is also symbolic of pure Yang. The elixir is the presence or the presence-ing of the original pure Yang in the body. Nei 內 means ‘inner’, so we are talking about Inner Alchemy, Inner Elixir. External alchemy, WaiDan 外丹, is a different discussion, and we will leave that for another time. My interest, practice, and teaching is concerned with Inner Alchemy.

The Stages of Inner Alchemy

Inner alchemy is traditionally said to have four or five stages, depending on how you count. ‘Foundation’ may or may not include the first stage, but either way there is a restoration and then a transformation of Jing Essence. This is the most material level.

Secondly, the Jing Essence joins with Qi Energy, and thus we start to move up the spectrum between materiality to immateriality. You can also see this in terms of purification.

Thirdly the Qi layer merges with, or transforms into Shen Spirit, which is the most immaterial layer that still is at least somewhat individually distinct. It is on one hand, Spirit, and on the other hand, it is also *your* spirit.

Beyond that, we transform Spirit, or merge, with Emptiness.

And finally, Emptiness merges with Dao.

This is the progression:

Jing → Qi → Shen → Emptiness → Dao

Material → Subtle → Immaterial → Empty → Totality, Unity

This is the process — what is the practice to which it refers?

Internal Medicine and External Medicine

Li Daochun 李道純 in the 13th century organized it well into separate processes — one for what he calls ‘internal medicine’ and another for ‘external medicine’.

In my view, alchemy proper really just refers to the internal medicine process. And this process begins at the Shen Spirit to Xu Emptiness stage of the process.

Now, depending on cultural contexts and one’s location in a grand cycle of human relationship to spirit (which is described in great detail in the Indian articulations of the yugas and described in lesser detail in the DaoDe Jing, and which proceeds from dark and coarse times to bright and refined times, Golden Ages wherein all being are Enlightened). Depending where you are in that great cycle of existence, different tools are needed.

Importantly this understanding includes the understanding that the model is nested and fractal such that, in any given time, there will also be a spectrum along which the individual is located. Some people will need coarser methods, and some people will need only the most refined methods.

The Age of Accelerated Revelation

In my view, we’re in a transition from the ending of a coarse time of conflict and delusion, entering a time in which things are moving the other way, moving toward refinement and purification and enlightenment of all sentient beings. I sometimes refer to it as the Age of Accelerated Revelation.

It could be a limited historical view, but I hope it is a broadly perceived, accurate view. We shall see. It’s my view that people are opening to spirit, to initial recognition, faster and faster and in greater and greater numbers.

With this in mind, I think it’s relevant to focus on the higher level alchemical teachings. Outwardly, this is apparent in this historical moment the emphasis within spiritual teachings on going direct to the non-dual teachings in whatever tradition, whether it’s Dzogchen or Advaita Vedanta or, in the Daoist case, *WuWei* 无为 - the doing-non-doing, the clear, still, non-action approach to meditation and realization of practice.

The Internal Medicine Framework

The internal medicine framework for internal alchemy starts at this point of recognition. Either via the transmission of a master or via the accidental encounter in the turbulence of being, one suddenly has direct experience, direct encounter of a timeless, spaceless non-being with the understanding of its essential nature to all being and all-encompassing nature with respect to all being.

So this is not enlightenment. We can more productively relate to it as the initial awakening - it is recognition, but it is the beginning of the process.

Even though we have moments, glimpses in meditation and in life of no-self, of radiant emptiness, of a state of being without qualities or characteristics, there is subsequently a process in which one allows that recognition to work through all the aspects of being. It massages out the aspects of your understanding, your processing of sensory experience, that are not in alignment with that direct understanding of reality.

The Path: Recognition, Decision, Faith

In the internal medicine path of internal alchemy, we begin with this recognition. Then we set the orientation - the orientation of our compass. We set our intention, associated with Yang Earth, and Wu 戊 in Li DaoChun’s diagram. Earth is associated with self, integrity, vessel, and most importantly, center.

We establish this intention with great decisiveness - to become fully enlightened, to follow the consequences of this recognition to its ultimate endpoint. This decision, this clear “decide once and never revisit” choice, is very important. It’s essential.

These are the three ingredients:

1. Recognition

2. The decision - setting the intention

3. Faith and confidence

In order to maintain the decision, the intention, which includes remaining, to the best of our ability, in that stateless state perpetually, 24/7, we must establish faith and confidence in our recognition and shore it up with faith and confidence that this process leads to complete, total realization - complete reality, as we say. The completion of realization.

Alchemy as Non-Doing

So that’s alchemy, from my perspective. It begins with recognition. It is impelled by choice, intention, decision. It is sustained by faith, confidence, and this is a path of non-doing. This is the WuWei 无为 of LaoZi and the DaoDe Jing. This is, in Daoism, the highest path.

Alchemy is a framework for holding this understanding, for holding the practice, and for passing it on.

That’s all for now. It is a topic that deserves many returns.