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.