David's Essays

We use a cauldron to store materials. We use a cauldron to cook and we can use a cauldron to keep the meal in. Witches traditionally use a cauldron for making potions, creating magic, transforming ingredients.

The body is also a cauldron. In it we store our energy. In it we also store many of the residues of past experiences. They are our body armours, places where memories of past stress are stored and which, whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, affect our daily function.

In our body we cook our potions, steam our stews and also digest our meals and our daily experiences. Our digestion is good or bad. We provide healthy or unhealthy meals for this cauldron, both literally and metaphorically. We enjoy or suffer the results of this cooking. Some of us are, metaphorically speaking, walking bags of undigested material passing out our flatulence in one way or another, emitting our bad breaths in our interactions with our world.

In our cauldron we can have seething prejudices, unresolved conflicts, past losses and unrealized hopes.

The state of our cauldron is also the state of our awareness. The state of our awareness is also our experience of life. Whatever we do, whatever we aim at, whatever happens and wherever we bring ourselves, to that we bring also the state of our awareness and the quality of the energy we are producing and are. There can be no doubt of this even if we choose to ignore it.

It seems curious to me how many people pursue happiness, social justice, religious growth, psychological integration etc and tend to ignore the quality of their energy. If you pray you can only pray with the energy that you are. If you practise self examination you can only do this using your awareness, confused or clear. If you wish the world peace you can only wish from a serene or not so serene mind. You are what you attend to, what you focus on. What you focus on brings you your experiences of life You can only focus with the state of awareness you have, the sort of person you are. Your experiences of life get determined by the quality of energy you bring to your life.

You have to start where you are. No journey commences where you are not. And where you are is in a body, a cauldron of energy, a cauldron which you can use for your advantage or disadvantage. In this cauldron you can refine energy and accumulate power. Taoists call this Self Cultivation or Cultivating Energy.

So if you are a pragmatist and a realist you concern yourself with your inner energy and what you are doing with it.

Your first cauldron is in your belly. There energy can get accumulated and refined. It is called the first Dantien in Taoist alchemy. There your sexual energies are gathered (the ingredients) and cooked. This accumulated and refined energy (Jing) rises up like cooking vapours (Chi) to the next Dantien in the heart region. There it is again accumulated and refined ( the cooking process) and rises as spiritual energy (Shen) to the top Dantien in the middle of the head. At each stage you can lose or spill some of this energy. The heart to head path is one of ecstasy. You bring to the head all those delicious qualities of the heart. Here you reconcile those two great contradictions, the heart and the head.

In Tantrik understanding in your body is the energy of the Goddess Shakti. She is seeking her mate Shiva to unite with Him in Bliss.

A wise and fortunate student awakens Shakti and encourages Her in Her path upward along the spine (Sushumna) to meet with Shiva in the top of the head. Shakti wants this and will help you. But She will also get impatient if you frustrate Her too much. She can give you a hard time. She can help you purify the paths and cleanse the pot, scouring it out. This is what I call house cleaning and it is indispensable. You don’t pour new wine into old bottles! The old will pollute the new

Whatever you want to do with your life if you give attention to accumulating and refining your energies, transforming them into Power you will bring to your life a balanced, integrated, powerful and expanded sense of Self. It can only help

It is a vast subject so this will only be an introduction. Essentially and originally Taoism is not a religion but as the years passed Taoist monks found they needed financial support and the public would pay for rituals, prayers etc. Taoism is about each person’s relationship with the Tao, the All. It is often called the watercourse way because it emphasises softness, receptivity and relationships and is thus “feminine”. The Taoist Internal Arts have in their repertoire, Tai Chi, Dayan Chi Kung, Hsing I, Lok Hup Ba Fa, Pa Qua, Chi Kung, Internal Alchemy etc.

In order to find one’s proper place in the Universe (relationship with the Tao) one must first find a proper relationship with oneself. In Taoist Health, disease often comes from a wrong relationship between the internal organs. One organ has either too much or too little energy; their yin and yang are not in balance. Taoist exercises aim at stretching the fascia that surrounds the organs so they can move. Then, by doing the form (Tai Chi etc) properly you massage the organs.

Each organ is connected with a meridian, a pathway for chi, energy. If these are blocked chi doesn’t flow properly. There are exercises Taoism teaches and healing sounds and movements that open the meridians.

In a proper relationship with yourself your attitudes are important. How you think about yourself and how you think about others will affect the health of your body and how energy moves. If you always want to be the best in the class so you can shine you are out of balance for your ego is too heavy for right balance. If you always think of yourself first and wish to win you are out of balance in your relationships and this will affect your health.

You have to acquire compassion, love, humility and patience. These allow your body to acquire the energy of De, virtue.

Master Moy, my teacher, said that every move you make paints your state of consciousness. Your biography is reflected in your biology, your body’s health is and how you move. So, in Tai Chi, a change in your attitude will affect how you do a move. Changing your attitude will open up energy flow. This is something you don’t hear in an exercise gym!

Therefore, to work on your body, it is not just enough to do exercise but you must work on your attitudes, to yourself and others.

To practise Taoism is to concern your self with the world around you; not just the people, but all the animals, insects and plants that make up our world. Being concerned with relationships means just that.

To work on attitude you also have to consider the structures in your mental body because there you will find the rigidity of concept that often determines an attitude. Structures in the mental body are determined often by heritage, family issues and cultural restraints.

You learn that to actually be yourself is extremely difficult, for you have all these voices from your parents, teachers, priests or cultural authorities telling you who you are and how to behave.

So if you want to get into a proper relationship with the Tao you have first of all to discover who the “I” really is that is coming to that relationship. If you don’t do that, you will bring a whole truck load of “not I” with you and therefore there is no possibility of a proper relationship.

Internal Alchemy includes meditation which allows the mind to become quiet. It is a quiet and open mind that can focus on the internal energy processes and discover where you are blocked. As we are a holistic and unified energy system any block of energy anywhere in that system affects the energy flow throughout the system. There is no such thing as something that is just local. Everything is related. Any rigidity here affects flow elsewhere.

Taoism gives you a philosophical construction around which you can build a system of action. You do something because you expect results from that action. It gets you up in the morning and motivates you.

However as you progress it all becomes more open ended and the constructions you held so dearly in the beginning (beliefs etc) start to become flexible just as your body is becoming flexible. Finally all supportive conceptual constructs collapse and you accept the Mystery of life and allow that Mystery to live your life.

Thus, ultimately, the path of Taoism is a path of gradually increasingly surrender, a discarding of all you thought you were, to which you egoistically clung and which, in fact, separated you from the All. The drop becomes the Ocean and you live the Peace that passeth Understanding.

It is a path of increasing energy, increasing Power and finally total surrender.

Often when some "seekers" read that they have to raise their energy and that the energy referred to is the sexual energy they try to suppress their sexual desires. The reasoning is why throw the energy away if you need it for Self cultivation? This line of thought is understandable and even reasonable.

Suppressing desire is trying to stifle something; it is like strangling a baby. Your whole life is run on desire. It is Passion that makes the journey possible and Passion that allows you to leap across vast chasms. Without some element of passion you won't even get out of bed.

It is Passion that gives your life vitality. Christ said he would spit out the lukewarm. Being lukewarm is to be half hearted. I see that in my classes. The half hearted are the hardest students to teach. You have their attention by default until something takes it elsewhere. You need to WANT to grow. It is Passion that makes you .gird your loins., pay attention and tackle a task.

Nevertheless to practise internal alchemy means having something that gets transmuted. You are not working in the make belief world and having imaginings and mere mood making fantasies. What gets transmuted is the sexual energy and if there is none there is none to transmute.

Firstly accept that your journey is not going to be made in one great leap. Being determined is not the same as trying to rush. It is all a process of going a little deeper day by day. As the day by days pass then so do perspectives change and what was difficult once becomes easier now.

Secondly, understand that internal alchemy means turning the senses inwards so that you can feel inside. If you can't even feel outside then you are half dead (the lukewarm) and have little to turn inwards. So the senses need to be alive. Alive senses pay attention to the world outside and they pay attention to the world precisely because they enjoy it. If you don't feel pleasure in your own body then you probably won't feel the pleasure of the senses in your embrace of the world beyond your skin. They go together.

For a number of reasons, sexual abuse for one, people shut down their connection with their body. What ever has happened has been so traumatic it is better not to feel the body because in the body is great pain. You can do exactly the same thing if you feel obliged to condemn your sexual impulses.

In internal alchemy the body is your friend. The body holds secrets, which are revealed to the lovers of the body. Loving your body is a key to feeling inner energy. In many of my Chi Kung exercises I tell my class that energy follows the hands. As your hands pass up and down your body you can feel the energy moving. It is like your hands are stroking your body, caressing it. This attitude is a loving one and is important for discovering the secrets the body holds. The body won't reveal them through torture.

Loving your body is a way to increase health. Increasing health is to have energy moving vitally, to have energy moving vitally is to have something for your alchemical activities. If there is nothing in your cauldron but the withered leaves dropped from a garden that has never been watered and has died of neglect then there is nothing to transmute.

Suppressing the sexual is to gradually kill your garden. It is to turn what should be a paradise into a clear cut emptiness; to have a desert inside where there could have been a paradise, a tangle of luxuriant growth, twisting climbing vines, rich with flowers, fruit and the exotic colourful wild animals of passion and desire.

Internal alchemy involves turning the attention inwards. Sometimes it is on the outside alive and vital and sometimes on the inside. If most of the time you are trying to stop the attention on the outside by thwarting desire you will deaden yourself. Things have to be in balance and for that there is no strict formula. Live your life .naturally. and don't struggle. The journey is done day by day and step by step.

A problem is created when one sees how someone who has arrived or is near to arriving behaves and one thinks that by copying their behaviour one will be like them. In Tai Chi your learn that mere copying only takes you so far and then you have to learn to be authentically yourself in the move. In life one has to be authentically oneself; not a mere copy cat. A copy cat is someone who is only half heartedly themselves.

In fact trying to be other than yourself is a strain and it is to be a fake. You are trying to live on borrowed knowledge. To be yourself is to be natural, to be without strain, to be relaxed. You are not fighting an inner civil war but are at peace and unified.

It is not always easy in Society to be oneself. As more people are themselves society will change.
Everyone is threatened by difference and change, but it will come, and it will come day by day and step by step.

P.S I am dipping into the poetry of Pablo Neruda in a the recent collection edited by Ilan Stavans and to illustrate what a poetic man with great sensuousness (perhaps sensuality ) can feel I will quote some lines from various poems.

and at times it rains; from the heat of the sky falls an infusion as silent as sweat.”

When I first wrote my little essay on Sexual Energy I originally entitled it "Alive Senses", because the idea I wished to convey was that for Internal Alchemy the senses must be vitally alive. If they weren't, then the energy used for Alchemy would be missing. The title "Sexual Energy" was misleading and got many people off on the wrong track, and because it is loaded word probably stopped some from even starting. One website Momma when she posted the essay had next to it a warning "Adult Content". Frankly I wasn't aware that anything I had written was raunchy; indeed some probably would have preferred it if I had been as I got invited to some very adult sites. The "adult" designation by her made me feel good, just like an adult!

So here I am, an adult, saying I am sorry for the title and wishing to go back a bit.

In my understanding, we are a unitary energy system. In Tai Chi I will demonstrate this by doing what I call a "Bellows Exercise". I sit down and stand up and as I sit down I show how all my energy becomes like a concentrated ball and then as I stand up I expand it into limbs, legs and head. This is to illustrate that as energy expands it fills the whole body equally and at the same time. Furthermore you will learn, eventually, from Tai Chi, that anytime you freeze energy, anywhere, the flow of energy everywhere else also gets affected; which is why in Tai Chi you aim to acquire softness, so that all the blocks that impede energy flow are removed. Softness does not mean flabbiness but that tensions have been worked out of the system so it is relaxed.

This is not an overnight thing nor is it merely physiological as the mind, with all its rigid inflexibilities, is involved, not to mention the taut ego!

As you become aware of energy and its flows you also note that energy flows up the spine. Along the spine are various points (chakras) the energy has to pass through and as it passes it enlivens them. It also purifies the channel along which it flows and the chakras themselves. If there are blockages it can get stuck in a chakra.

This energy comes very quickly to the sex centre and people can become aroused and very sexually active if a lot of energy flows there. Indeed, if you are sensitive to energy then, when you are next to someone like that you will get a corresponding sensation in the same area. (Adult content!) Being next to most teenage boys will give you this feeling, and some young women overly aware of their breast energy, or a woman (or man too) strongly sexually attracted to you. It can become uncomfortable at times and you learn to shut it off by ignoring it and not responding to it.

My first essay wished to clarify that you have a choice how you use your energy. You can express it sexually. This allows it to repeatedly flow in that way. Or you can freeze that out. However, as we now know, freezing energy anywhere affects the flow of energy through the whole system. We don't want that.

I had a 40 year old woman write me to ask if still being a virgin had thwarted her spiritual growth. From letters she had posted on a chat site I knew she was generous, warm, supportive and kind. I replied that it didn't thwart her spiritual growth, indeed it made her very exceptional as the reason why she had never fully lain with a man was because the loving intimacy she wanted had never been there.

There is a difference between being sexually discriminating, self disciplined and being frigid; someone who for whatever reasons, abuse say or tortuous religious compunction or psychological problems, has shut down that centre. Many who do this have also closed their senses off so they feel their body less and they feel life less.

As you progress more and more of this energy will go beyond the sex centre and it becomes very fulfilling to have other centres brimming with it. This comes when the full energy has passed through and risen up.

You know the feeling you have in the body when you are full of sexual energy and before you release it how alive the body feels at that moment, well, I can't talk for women, but as man that disappears after the sex act. In Alchemy you try to keep that fullness so that the energy cooks in your cauldron. It is not for nothing that the first cauldron is precisely in the belly. There the energy is accumulated and refined so that sexual energy becomes "jing" and is transformed into chi.

And so the process goes on with accumulation of chi and its refining into "shen" spiritual energy. Moreover the refined energy also goes back down and mingles with the energy there.

How you use your energy is by choosing how you do this. Someone pointed out boxers refrain from sex so they become meaner for a fight. I don't think this implies that the quality of the energy is mean but if you have more of it can flow into the areas where you are mean and make you really mean. Like a Mike Tyson on a rampage.

You can use that energy for anything that attracts you. Being a mean boxer, writing poetry, being compassionate, being passionate about your interests, excessively long posts on chat sites! your Tai Chi or your spiritual growth. Choice and growth. All according to your perspective and attitude

But if that energy is not flowing or has been exhausted then a lot of that will stop, or be curtailed for a while.

My Sexual Energy post was not to encourage sexual activity, but to remind people the way out of any problem is through it. You don't want to shut off the flow by suppression. Until, in time, and with various practices the energy rises, then be natural and normal, and discriminating if you want, about its expression. Don't torture yourself. Pain is a path best avoided.

You know you don't want to become old and then wish you had watered that garden more. (I had some older men write that taking off their clothes and putting them back on again became all too much trouble!) It will be awful to be left with unfulfilled fantasies.

It is a wonderful relief when the energy passes through the sex centre and goes beyond, because, frankly, stuck there it poses many problems. So many people think with their genitals. It is amazing to me to see on these adult sites how people spend this energy. (Do you know I was a little shy to go into them in case I got caught out!)

Of course my post also attracted some humour. Sexual Energy had fun poked at it. Hem Hem!

Taoist Internal Alchemy meets everybody on their level. Saying the same thing in another way, you come to it as you are. As you are so you start, sexually frigid, sexually active, sexually very active, sexually restrained etc. From there you will grow. Orgasm can come to mean something very different. Shakti exploding in your head maybe.

So to the 40 year old virgin I wrote words of encouragement. It is good when passions burn but the passions have moved up in the spine.

We grow through desire. It is by pouring our energy into our passions that we will grow. The senses should be alive, vitally alive so you embrace your world with passion and energy. Then you will stroke pets, hug people, smile on the street, be friendly to cashiers, care about the world and all its little animals and species. You will embrace the physical world with physical hugs. You will be warm about it. As you express the energy thusly so too will Energy flow in you. The key is focus, love and surrender.

Internal Alchemy needs energy for its work. You grow with it; or you stifle it, then you are just slowly dying, a fish flapping in the desert of your making.

We discussed this topic in my School and humorously we decided we would attract more people if we changed our name to the School of Tai Chi & Erotic Arts. My web manager even did a new logo with nude people entwined around the letters Erotic.

New students might be confused why so many forms are offered and what the differences between them are. This short essay addresses this question.

All Taoist forms work on different levels. Some people start Tai Chi as an exercise to improve their health, some have a specific health problem, some want Martial Arts skills and some want to cultivate energy for spiritual considerations. Many people move through these categories and come to the last one after time.

The form will meet you on the level at which you enter. This means both the condition of your body and your intentions. It is delightful to see a mixed group of people, all ages and sizes doing the same thing with enthusiasm.

As you practise you find that growth depends on what I call making connections. As you make these connections you get a better understanding of how internal energy moves.

To make a connection requires that the student works on his foundation, his structure.

(For more on this see my e book “Stalking Personal Power & Peace). This can take a long time and require a lot of work. Generally speaking the older you are the more work that it will require. During this process you will be doing an exercise that is excellent for health.

Once you start making connections then the real fun begins, for you can then explore the connections.

I have found that the Yang Tai Chi set and the exercises related to it are excellent to establish the foundation and to help make some connections. Once you have some connection I have found that forms like Lok Hup Ba Fa are better suited for exploring inner energy connections. The one I like the most is probably Dayan (Wild Goose) Chi Kung. Both these forms are more ancient than Tai Chi.

Master Moy said that as you understand internal energy you have to admit that Chen Hsi-I (the founder of Lok Hup Ba Fa) knew more than Chan San Feng the founder of Tai Chi. I presume he said this because this form is able to explore more profoundly the internal energy flows in the body.

There are movements in Dayan Chi Kung that none of the other forms contain. Each movement allows the energy to flow in a particular way.

I think that meditation is essential to understand and feel internal energy flow.

Once an understanding has been gained it will naturally affect the movements in another form. Thus I have learned aspects of Hsing-I that no one ever taught me, through cross fertilisation. Most of what I most appreciate has come in this way for once you start the path exploring connections you are on your own individual path free of other;s authority.

After the hard work in making the connections has been done then the student can move into the practise of doing the form less athletically and strenuously. This is just as well because as you age you become less capable of athleticism any way.

You might have seen Martial Art forms demonstrated in a manner that require the flexibility and strength that only youth can provide. In fact I sometimes think that the demonstrator is more a gymnast or ballet dancer than anything else. If energy cultivation only required strength and flexibility then the whole Cirque de Soleil would be enlightened Masters.

It seems fitting that as you age and have less mobility for leaps etc that you can enter that quiet phase of what I call inner ecstacy. You have learned how to move energy in a way that creates flows of delight and no longer need feel constrained to sweat and look impressive. The form you practise will, to the untrained eye, give no indication of what you are feeling and experiencing.

My experience has been that if you practise your form athletically it will probably remain an exterior art. You need luck, grace or a skilled teacher to move into the realms of inner energy. The very same movement when done with an internal focus gives a different sensation. Then you know that by moving your hands you move internal energy. Not only move internal energy but can allow it to go places that can only be described as illuminating because you experience the movement as waves of light. You bring Light to your heart and feel rapture. You bring Light to your head and see a head full of Light.

This is something very different from learning how to dispatch an opponent with a blow. You might never need that self defence skill but a body full of Light is what you will experience when you die so you are laying up for yourself “Treasures in Heaven.”

At this stage your body has taken you to places that can only be described as bodiless. Maybe fulfilment of the the physcial growth is to know you are beyond body! When it eventually falls away what will remain will be that awareness of Bliss and Silence.

To start at the beginning; we all have bodies. Most of our day revolves around activities related to the concept we might have that “I am the body”. Here we are on a par with all animal life with our needs for physical survival (food and drink, shelter, physical safety and the chance to reproduce).

As we become adept at all this we just raise the stakes. Our food can include well cooked meals or fancy restaraunts, our habitation can grow from hovels to student lodgings to an expensive home with a large mortgage. All of which requires money so most people need to acquire this; indeed spend a considerable portion of their lives doing just this so they can satisfy the needs coming from the “I am a body” identity.

Even when we raise our awareness from”I am a body” to “I have a body” these activities will remain.

If you made a list of how much you do each day precisely because you have a body you will see how body consciousness dominates your life.

So we start exercise programmes, eat properly so we can maintain the good functioning of our body and sleep well etc. We have to make time in our busy life for this. For we have learned, perhaps at our cost, that if the body is not well maintained suffering comes.

If you examine exactly how many of your woes start precisely because you have a body and bodily needs you will find it a long list. I wish I could start a bodiless society for then there would be so much time for other things! Can you imagine angels getting together and moaning over aging joints, sore throats and intestinal discomfort! Not to mention talk of the clothes that no longer fit them because of weight gain, or which are now out of style.

Somewhere down the line you might come across the concept that within the body are energies that most people don;t know how to develop or cultivate. You read about chakras, kundalini, chi, internal energies that can be accumulated, balanced and circulated. You hear talk of a body of light, of the Soul.

When you discover that behind the eyes there is a physical world of internal energy, inner rooms in your own body just waiting to be explored then physical life takes on a new dimension and becomes considerably more interesting. You can begin to FEEL your soul embrace you in a warm cuddle of great love. You can see/feel how you move internal energy, how inside your body and behind your eyes a world of light sparkles and glows;

To live like that is to begin to explore subtler aspects of physical life. It is fascinating and even sensually pleasant.

In my School I teach how to raise energies, especially from heart to head which causes a rush of ecstacy. Good health results from balancing internal energy. Personal power and serenity comes from accumulating energy. A chaotic, stressed energy flow inside will manifest in the outer very soon.

You can call this exploring and experiencing God manifest in the world. God immanent. You discover that there is such a great Mystery and you don;t know much of It.

To die, to drop your body before before you do this is such a shame. It is to have lived a physical life in its most banal form.

Priotorise your life if you want to do more with your time than wipe off the crumbs from your kitchen table.

You can also in your meditation come to point where all is silent, everything about you has dropped away and you feel ‘nothing matters;. This is like saying ‘there is no matter.;

It is an emptiness that seems so very full and so very fulfilling; a feeling that there is nothing to be done. All of your life vanishes into a vast point of unutterable contentment. This can be considered as God Transcendent. It is the Ultimate refuge from the world and you allow yourself to soak in It, to saturate yourSelf with Its balm.

When you feel this you no longer feel “I am a body” or I have a body”; even “I am” is too much for that implies duality. It is “I” or “Am” and nothing more.

Coming back to your body and your world and its cares you will have been given a wonderful balancing, the sense that despite all the turbulence “All is Well” or “Nothing matters.”

Your life will be what you choose to focus on. If you make no time for all that hidden joy life offers you won;t experience it.

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MASTERY or MSTERY.

If one practices something for a long time one often becomes a master of it. My Tai Chi teacher was called master Moy. Whatever the discipline, it starts with some faltering steps, great uncertainty loaded with lots of enthusiastic hope. With each step facility grows and the unfamiliar becomes comfortable. In Tai Chi it is difficult to remember the choreography. Moreover there seems little reason for any of it and the external movements are imposed coercively on the student;s body. However, gradually, as the student;s focus increases and with regularity of practice what was once an imposition becomes natural, what was clumsy becomes graceful.

As I like to tell my students what was before an external movement has, by dint of repeated practice, gone within and effected changes inside. The movements now come from within and get expressed externally. What was once mechanically imposed both in choregraphy and timing now flows with a rhythm that is determined by the poetry of internal energy.

I think all art is learned in this way. Step by step you master all the keys. Day by day you gain greater control, greater knowledge of the art and you glide into mastery. Your mastery is gained by accumulating experience, by learning something new. At first it seems like almost every day something new is learned. As you become rich in experience some of the new things take longer to learn. You might work on just one aspect for several months before the teacher suggests something new.

However as I always tell beginners Tai Chi is never learned without effort nor is it learned with effort. There is a great paradox in this.

A great conumdrum viz. does enlightenment come because you become a Master or does it become because you surrender? I have heard enlightenment endlessy debated. What is enlightenment and who is enlightened? Personally I have never found this too interesting and I like to leave the “what is it?” in the realm of Mystery and who is enlightened is mere gossip. A little like children prattling actually.

The paradox comes because the imagined state of enlightenment is one where the ego has been subsumed into something greater.

Take Tai Chi.The movements of Tai Chi become poetry when you no longer do them. They seem to do you, which is probably why the Chinese call it playing Tai Chi or maybe it should be considered being played.

All that effort and all that control has to reach a point when you STOP and let it happen. There is something of grace in all this, for it seems miraculous. Ego implies effort. There is an “I” that does the move better and better.

The word master if you are gender sensitive implies masculine and indeed the path of mastery could be considered a masculine approach. It requires muscles and effort. I started to wonder what the feminine equivalent of master would be. Mistress? To say she is a real Mistress doesn;t seem to have the right ring. But what about Mster (like in the Feminist Ms)? So you would have Masters and Msters. That started me thinking of Mastery and Mstery and that ultimately Truth is such a Mystery.

When we start an art like Tai Chi we have such definite ideas, so many rules and yet as we grow we find an absence of much of this. It becomes less goal orientated, partakes more of freedom, dwells more in the realms of feeling, becomes more accepting of what is and what is happening, in the Here and the Now. This strikes me as a feminine approach. You are not trying to grab Mastery or Enlightenment but allowing something larger to suffuse Itself into you, allowing the wondrous poetry and sensual pleasure of submitting to an inflow of Grace and Joy.

Then with a big smile I saw Mastery become Mstery as the masculine and femine become balanced.

I read a book on Zen archery and in it the Sensei said that people who see archery as hitting the bullseye often miss the point. Indeed he said that there is nothing more ugly than to see some archers hit the bulls eye time after time, because what they miss is the letting go of themselves in the experience. They might hit the centre of the target but they miss their centre. Not living from your centre is ugly. The beauty comes from being in this centre. In this centre you are in the centre of the Universe, indeed you hardly exist and what exists in and through you is the Power and the Glory.

When people start in my School they are generally motivated by self interest. Often there is something about themselves they wish to change or improve; a bad back, or other health concerns, lack of emotional strength, exploring a gentle martial art or just to get some exercise. I had one group of three women who wanted to get out of the house of an evening and regarded it as a women;s night out, rather like going to watch a male stripper together, but more wholesome, though maybe less fun!

Some come because they have long wanted to meditate or have tried meditation and not succeeded and feel that now is the time to give it another go. Some want to explore esotericism. Some mistake it for eroticism and hope for sensual windows to open. (Joke!) Some, as a friend commented, have got on the wrong bus and give it up immediately.

We are generally best motivated by self interest. The School promises it can teach certain things, offers certain advantages and people are attracted by this to the extent they will pay for one month and give it a try. There is an exchange of energy, cash from them and a class from me.

For a while I have been thinking of making it obligatory to commit to try out, and perhaps pay, for three months when someone starts. What I teach is not immediately comprehended and it would be wiser to take the time to discover hidden aspects.

I say on my website that my School is not for the casual. Not many people who come would class themselves as casual. It is a question of perspective, theirs or mine! also a question of degree.

I find that a lot of my time gets spent trying to maintain their interest, to keep the enthusiasm at a level that makes the classes worthwhile for them and me. A lot of this is like being an entertainer trying to get the audience to come again. I get students who find it impossible to be regular, come late or leave early; students who fit it in like all other social engagements i.e. when convenient. Some students don;t practice between their weekly classes. To all these I say the longest journey begins with the first step and that as long as they keep taking one step after another they will make progress. I say that practicing once a week is better than nothing but to remember it is right next to nothing!

Self interest is what gets us up in the morning and the degree of our self motivation and passion determines how much juice we extract from the mango. Each step a student takes should increase their passion for learning. Once you get a feel for the delight of the spiritual life It won;t let you go, not easily at any rate. Once a student has overcome lethargy, apathy or the discomfort of bad health or irregular habits then there is only one real obstacle, the ego.

On one;s spiritual path one starts to clear out dross or impurities that prevent clarity of perception, awareness and real balance. This house cleaning can make you feel worse. For a start you really see the dirt and, often, that doesn;t make you feel better. The ego can be really resistant to change. No matter how often I tell a student that somewhere down the line they will get an ego challenge from the teachings, when it comes they often up and quit. Something happens they don;t like, something I say or do perhaps. At this stage it is easier to give up than continue. Continuing takes real grit; the casual don;t have this. Being around Master Moy for the long haul took determination and grit. He made sure his long term students worked on their egos. It was never enjoyable but always worthwhile.

If one maintains regular practice and regular contact with the teacher a lot of growth happens by osmosis. A good teacher spreads their energy, embraces their students with their aura, which is one reason that students feel the better for a class. If they are doing ‘housecleaning; then contact with the teacher keeps the pot on the boil; which is to say maintains the level of discomfort!

As growth happens then one also wants to help. This is where self interest, which got the student there to start with, takes a side turn. They discover that personal growth is inevitably wrapped up with attitudes to other people and their growth. The “Me” packing now expands to include “Us”.

Even your own personal self growth is seen as valuable for the larger context. As you become more self aware, more expanded in your consciousness, more balanced in your energies, more serene, tolerant and loving then you spread those qualities around you consciously or unconsciously.

I am one of those people who foresee the world heading to greater conflict, greater tension and greater payback from the environment. One would like to think there is plan in all this that out of catastrophe will come a new age and a new earth for those that survive. That is uncertain. What is certain that the more people there are who are established in their Power and their Peace, who have forged links with the Larger Other, who felt embraced by their Souls, not as a concept but as a sensuous living reality the greater the chance the planet will make it through.

Our initial self interest in taking a class can bring us to that, a transformed world. That makes each step, each smidgeon of interest worthwhile.

One will see statements like this in much Taoist writing and on Taoist chat forums. It is generally speaking useless advice as far as how to live one’s life. I remember well on a cold drizzly morning when the TM group I led was trying futilely to save a large and carefully constructed cardboard Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome that had collapsed from rain. It was going to be part of our exhibition at some New Age festival in Cape Town.As a replacement we had ordered a large tent. There was some panic amongst those assembling and those preserving. The festival was starting. Someone was energetically, perhaps feverishly hammering in stakes. A Hippie walked by and sweetly commented,”Go with the flow.” That’s the sort of thing I mean. When you are trying to pay off a mortgage or raise bail or get a good seat in a film, concert or a bus, when the roads are iced and you are in a hurry, when you’ve lost your glasses, when your child has gone missing, when you’ve sliced your finger you won’t think of “there is only Tao.” Nor will you appreciate been told this.

But it is good knowledge for good times and it is in the good times you should explore it because life spirals, and things can abruptly become chaotic. Once you get the hang of it it just takes a focussed breath and you are there.

There are schools based on Shankara’s Advaita philosophy. Non dualism. Ramana Maharishi. (I visited his ashram in Tiruvannamalai in ’69). His practice of asking,”Who am I.” Nisargadatta’s (“I am That” is a marvellous, miraculous book) advice to meditate on “I am not the body.”

People walk around muttering,”this is all illusion.” Say that to your bleeding finger or the bailiff! People write little articles on that for chat forums. It is almost common knowledge in certain circles. Probably the person a student told me about who had learned Tai Chi in 3 months believes it.

It is the old problem of claiming knowledge prematurely, knowing Tai Chi after 3 months. That sort of thing.

Kashmir Shaivism teaches Monism. A sort of Glorified Advaita. There is only One. All is Shiva’s dance. Or more accurately The Dance is Shakti, and Shiva Is. It is the Tantric approach, the Toltec approach.

I say,”don’t say you are not the body”. That is fake and artificial. Book learning.

Go into your body and discover who you really are. This is Taoist internal alchemy

I have just finished Bob Dylan’s “Chronicles”. Like all artists I know or have read about he studied his art. He practised. Probably still does. He did his homework and paid his dues. None of it fell into his lap no matter how great his genius. Bob Marley wouldn’t allow laughter at rehearsals. (Dollar Brand told me to keep quiet or get out when I laughed at something humorous he said while his jazz group were rehearsing.) Not everyone is musical or talented in drawing or writing poetry. The world is full of well meaning mediocrity.

We all have bodies. We all have nervous systems. We all have an inner energy grid. This can be our instrument. We can make of our awareness, our meridians a work of art. How wonderful a work of art depends only on your focus and your passion, the time you put in. You can be a wannabe or you can really become that.

You will discover your internal energy. You will feel how it moves, how it spirals, circulates. You will discover a miraculous thing, by going in you start to feel what is without.

You will have seen photos of our Milky Way galaxy, how the energy moves in a graceful spiral. It is simply beautiful. A few delicate spirals contains billions of stars, and contains us, here on earth, in our own homes, pondering it all. The energy passes through them all and it is clear that it is one system. Seen from a large enough perspective it can be perceived as one system, a unity.

It has been my experience that when the inner energy becomes expanded, balanced, harmonious, luminous, flowing, spiralling (none of these words carelessly chosen) when your energy grid has been purified, when the lights have popped on inside, so you will feel a connection with the lights out there. It is as though the body becomes the earth, becomes part of that great Milky Way Spiral. Something extraordinary happens then. The energy makes me feel so cleansed, so empty that nothing else exists. It is hard to say “I”, to feel “I”. There is only the dancing, the joy.

As you evolve you discover that your own energy is linked to a life force. David Suzuki says,” We are our environment” in that whatever we put out into it we eventually take back into our bodies. It is as though there is one energy on our planet that expresses itself as life here, changing and spiralling. It will go on whether humans survive their own follies or not.

In one sense our growth depends on how we utilise our own energy. Nothing happens without energy. If you want to evolve you need more than energy you need POWER. Power is focussed energy, not a profligate energy that is scattered and wasted, but an energy that is accumulated, cultivated, refined and directed towards a goal.

As you grow you begin to prioritise your desires so instead of fluttering in all directions you try to fly specifically.

As you do this you discover that instead of you toiling with great effort up a slope the path is often graced by the goal lifting you up for a few paces. You get drawn up.

What I am saying is is this. We live in a sea of energy. For a while it seems like we grow by imbibing that energy; what is without is taken within.But sometimes it seems more as if that energy is filling us. As I have repeatedly told my students, “When you enter the Mystery, the Mystery enters you.” Then what seemed without is now living within.

We have bodies that are ‘wired; for Bliss. We have an energy grid (meridians and channels, nadis) already in place. However the grid has blocks and the energy that flows along it is not at maximum. Our task is to clean up the energy lines. You can call it scouring the system. Purification. Our task is to open up to the energy in the Universe. This is done by what we eat, drink and breathe. Not just that, but how we do them too; with what attitude, with what feeling. How we sit, how we stand, and how we move.

Just recognising that you are an internal energy system is a big step in the right direction. It means you need to feel within. What is within is going to spill out. As I like to quote,” What you think, you will say; what you say, you will do and what you do, you will become.” You lay out your future in this way and when it arrives at your door you can;t blame anyone for the wailing and weeping!

When you start feeling you are an internal energy system you can start cooperating with it. You practise Right intent.

It is fundamental tenet of mine that there is a Force in life that wants us to evolve. It isn;t trying to make the path unnecessarily hard, to arbitrarily throw obstacles in our way. As you start to feel a harmony within you start to harmonise with this Force. There is an energy that knows better than your small self what you need. At times this energy takes over and gives you a jolt in the right direction. This is Kundalini. Kundalini is that Power which makes the crooked straight, which goes before you to prepare a place, which sweeps through your system. When it is active go along for the ride!

It has been my experience that many of the bliss experiences are purification of the system. As Kundalini cleanses you can feel pleasure, even sensual. Your breathing follows a pattern of its own. Your body can move. You can make sounds. It is like that energy that dog has when it shakes itself dry. A spontaneous cleansing. (The sort of thing our planet is beginning to do, as we seem incapable to doing it ourselves. The earth will shake and we will wonder,; why is this happening?;)

In Tantric terms Kundalini is the Shakti power. It is the Goddess and she wants to unite with Her Lord Shiva in your head. She desires Him. She can become impatient to join with Him. All her movements are to get there; to rise up your spine in a gush of Ecstacy, Light and Power and shimmer in your head.

Energy loops back on Itself. She, Shakti, who is creation returns to the Silent One. There is completion in that Joy.

Kundalini will completely seduce you. She is a jealous lover though. You have to give her your All. You know when you are with someone but they know you are elsewhere. You even look over their shoulders. This will get you nowhere. You know how rejected you feel when this happens to you. There are no half measures with Kundalini. Oh yes you can do it that way. Just as I can have students who regard what I teach as a hobby, something to do once a week, when they are not busy with something else.

Each step is still a step in the right direction. No effort is wasted. Nevertheless to find the All you must give your all. When you do that,

We live it either badly, or well; or may be, for many of us, with mediocrity, if we are honest. Most of the time, the world with its insistent clamour commands our attention. When we need a break from that we work on our pleasures, or our escape routes. In between we try meditation, massage and spiritual pursuits. We pick up how to books, to find balance, to find soul mates, we practise techniques.

There is an important commercial niche catering for these needs, these compulsions, this huge absence that fills our days with its nervous energy, running and ruining our lives. The “happy” majority has no time for any of this. Material needs in a needy, or greedy, material world form their daily diet.

It is a tough world for the sensitive, the caring, the empathetic folk who listen to the news and burst into tears. It is a tough world in which to get our spiritual teeth.

We can feel balance, if not all of the time, then a lot of the time. First we need to make the time to work on the communication lines; the lines to our own souls. This is like learning a new language; like learning a new language while all we mostly hear is the babble of the old, old crappy words that come back like the sorry echoes of our own repetitive screams. It isn;t easy and it requires persistence; but when you have heard the world;s (your) noise long enough you decide to say, ”enough!”

Don;t wait too long. Time might run out for you. As I wrote in my book, “Stalking Personal Power and Peace” don;t wait till you are dead to find out who you are.

One of the things mystics can teach us is that truth is a paradox. It often includes two extremes.

Maharishi taught me that the Infinite is both bigger than the biggest and is also smaller than the smallest. At both ends of the scale lies the infinite.

When in my practices I become smaller, smaller, smallest then suddenly I become nothing. When I do this, this Nothing is the All. When Nothing else exists but “I”, this pure and simple “I”; actually let me rephrase that, when nothing else exists but this unqualified “I” I have expanded to All.

This afternoon as I began my Chi Kung exercises my tongue touching my upper palate, which connects the two main meridians, started to vibrate. I become alive inside. As I become alive inside, my body hums. I also disappear. All that is left is the Now. The Tao. David has vanished, like a falling ripe fruit.

Here and the Tao.
Hearing the Tao

Silence.

What else is there to say?

LISTEN.

Time is gliding by. Moment by moment our lives move into their personal mystery. We move from place to place. But if can attend to where we are, listen to the Silence between thoughts, feel the Gap between breaths then we come to the Here and the Tao.

In my Tai Chi classes I encourage my students to feel that moment between each extreme, at the end of a stretch, at the end of an out breath, at the bottom of a ‘sinking; at the completion of an inhale; in these moments the Eternal can be glimpsed. As this happens more and more the energy system gets soaked in that experience. It is very fulfilling, very complete; it is difficult to move away from it, like saying goodbye to a lover, or your mother or, what the heck, your Self.

You see your life like a tiger stalking its prey. Or the other way round. Life stalking you like a tiger; going round and round you waiting for that moment, that instant of Divine forgetting, when in a momentous Unknowing you let go all you are not, forget it so utterly, so totally and you are embraced by those arms you have sought from the very beginning of time. And oh! the joy of the now.

This is a simple technique I use and teach that is very effective. It is simple and magical. One great advantage is that each person can play around with it and explore its possibilities on their own and in their own way. There are no lists of rules, no sequence of moves to be remembered, no correct procedures; just start the process and let it develop, as it does. Follow along, like following a stream, innocently, curiously, in wonderment.

If you can, accept the concept, that each person was created by God, or the Universe, or Tao. As the Bible states, God formed clay and “breathed into it”. We have inside us, like a memory, that Pulse of Breath; our Original Breath, just as you might have read of our Original Face or our Original Mind. This is what we were, before….

If you like think of it as the proverbial twinkle in your parents eyes just before they conceived you. That pulse of joy that brought you into existence.

I like to imagine my Original Face as that of a child with a smile on it. It is an easy image for anyone I think, a young face with a smile. While this is not using the inner child concept of New Age psychology, there is value in imagining that happy young energy inside. The original breath inside us is a young child, innocent and open.

Taoist practices try to get us in touch with our own energy. Once one can accept the concept of our own inner energy one can start to feel it. Once you start to feel it you are in a position to cultivate it. This is the aim of the inner smile practice.

Shut your eyes and feel your lips. Immediately you should feel the energy on the lips. Now bring them into a slight smile. I think it is impossible to do this and not feel some happy feeling at the same time. A student of my School of Esoteric Arts, a biologist, speculates that as the muscles move into a smile then the wiring of our emotions is such that we feel good; that it is hard to put the lips into a smile and not feel happy.

This good feeling, this sense of a happy energy inside is the basis of all that follows.

Life on earth is sun based. We get the gravitational effect of the moon on the tides etc but our main energy source is the sun. We are energetically linked to the sun. It shines its energy on us and we grow with it. Without it we will become extinct. It is central to our existence.

When I shut my eyes for this practice I like to imagine a big ball of golden energy like the sun just above my head and beaming into my face. I turn the corners of my lips into a slight smile. I breathe into that smile, feeling good. I feel that golden ball of energy. I feel warm on my face. After some breaths I put that stretching smiling energy across my forehead. With each in breath I stretch it across, across each lobe of the brain; with each out breath relax and just feel the energy there. Then I put it so it stretches across my eyes, into the corner of each eyelid. I find this very relaxing.

In this way I move down the body, with each breath feeling that energy of the sun melting me inside, smiling across me.

Spots that can be included are across the throat, from the heart across the chest, across the belly in front and then across the back at belly button level, Ming Men (this links into the belt chi or kidney meridian); from the spine in middle of the shoulders to the shoulders. There is a gate on the spine there where energy gets stuck.

Across inner organs, pelvis, groin, across knees, across soles of feet, across toes, hands.

I tell my students to love their body. When you smile at your body it is like a boss coming into a place of work and letting the employees know they are appreciated. When you scowl at yourself you are like an intimidating dominating boss making the workers tense. Your organs will function better if they feel appreciated and loved.

Some people go around with an inner scowl and life confirms it. They see all that is wrong and it makes them feel worse. They seek for what is wrong. They are the critics of life. They have the eyes and nose for that, inner scowl at the ready. Some go around with an inner smile. When things go wrong they make them better.

Inside us we have all sorts of different and competing energies. A smile is like saying,

” OK. It is all OK” like a fond mother who watches her children and friends play. We are doing the best we can, so give your self a smile.

You can beam inside a smile to someone in need of it, someone ill, someone unhappy, to someone with whom you have a problem maybe.

I use it when I practice my moving forms. This is not as easy as sitting with a smile, for, by habit, as one focuses carefully or when tries to remember the sequence one loses a smile. I have students who purse their lips or grimace as they concentrate. When one is trying to concentrate on inner sensations, internal movement one can lose the smile and go blank with concentration.

It is not an external grin. We often grin when we are trying to project something or manipulate somebody. Radiant flashes of teeth.

It is a smile that bubbles up from inside, something essential inside, of contentment. Like when a baby sees someone who loves it. A smile that says,”Here I am”,”Here you are”, “Here we are and isn;t it grand?” The sort of smile you hope God has when She sees you doing your best.

You can imagine a very accomplished martial artist who is challenged by someone he knows he can easily beat. He can smile, a smile of total confidence, of knowing his power, a smile of nothing to prove, nothing to do, just sure of it all.

In my forms I often try to maintain that smiling energy and in each move have it flow there. As I extend the smiling energy flows along the arm, the muscles stay relaxed and I imagine the smile extending beyond the fist, beyond the palm, into the world. When I stand up the smile spirals up inside and reaches above my head, stretching into “heaven”. When I sink it goes down into the earth.

So much of our life is spent trying to accomplish something, to get somewhere. The inner smile recognizes that where we are is All,

Every day informed citizens have tragedy and turmoil thrown at them. The more informed they are the larger their intake of this. Blogs, alternative news sources, conspiracy groups, earth changes links, all provide a steady trough of fodder at which many feed. We do it voluntarily so that we may know the real truth, “real” because so often the main stream media ignore the facts. Nevertheless even the main stream radio, TV and newspapers pummel us enough with bad news.

Firstly, realise that whatever is outside of you, the bad news, affects you if it finds a resonance inside. Birds of a feather flock together. In other words if you feel like dumping on the world the distribution networks will give you what you want. “It is all going down to ruin” you feel inside and so the outside input provides confirmation of this.

A woman tells a man friend that whatever she tells her husband goes in one ear and out the other. Her friend says his wife is the opposite. Whatever goes in one ear goes immediately out her mouth.

We are mostly like that woman. What interest us we like to share with others. So when we hear that bird flu will kill 100 million in 2 weeks, or that global warming is irreversible, or that the Bush gang plan to inflict something on the world again or whatever the bad news is we repeat it. We join the network of bad news.

We all know folk who can recite chapter and verse of what went wrong and what will go wrong in their lives and others. The internet is a great place for this. Instant focus on the latest scandal; instant oblivion on that and on to the next; till one reels unsteadily with the weight one now carries.

Read that last sentence again. We will become the catastrophe. Do you want that as your future?

I don;t mean living uninformed in a cocoon of isolatory false optimism, but practising good emotional hygiene to rid ourselves from inside of the resonances that latch onto bad news and become fervent spreaders of it. We become what we dwell on and there is a danger we become that awful virus of tragedy contagion.

So daily we need a hygiene that cleanses us. Meditation etc. I have my routines that affirm the beauty of life in me and outside me. (See my website www.esotericarts.org under topics.) I listen to the National CBC news, skim read some of the bad news on the internet, feel worse, shake my head and wonder where it will all lead. Then I take my spiritual bath or I look out over the lake to the trees stretching to the horizon, or the birds at the feeders or the cat snoozing in the sun and feel so lucky to be here. You don;t want to leave the house carrying all that toxicity and spread it. So practise mental and emotional hygiene.

The spiritual vaccination comes from any practice that roots you in joy, not as an escape, but as a fundamental reality.

We have layers of awareness going outside or inside. We can choose our direction. We can choose our focus. Inside we can feel our Bliss body. This is not New Age sweet talk. We have an energy layer to ourselves that is Bliss energy. It is there whether you have one leg, a bad knee, are in danger of bird flu or whatever.

You learn to communicate with it, to FEEL it. Reading about it, talking about it doesn;t cook the meal. You have to do the work to get there, not just imagining, faking or wishing. Many of the people who want this aren;t prepared to do the practicing.

What I teach is how to get in contact with your inner energy. It won;t happen without getting the foundations right. Taoist internal alchemy is not wishy washy. If you want, then you DO. And you keep on practising the doing till you get it right. Each step in the right direction brings the goal nearer.

I intend soon to write an essay on Meditation as work, Meditation as Fun (Play or Bliss). One mustn;t forget that meditation is also work. Take standing meditation. It takes grit to do this. I have put lots of hours experiencing this grit. Now it has become flow and fun. I do 6 different arm positions (see my book under “topics” for instructions) and hold each one for 7 minutes with the knees slightly bent and the pelvis dropped (not tucked please). This can be hard on legs and arms so it takes grit to do. But now I hear the hum and roar of different energies, the lights in the head and the sense, at times, that the body vanishes and all that is left is the absorption into That.

My TM has given a deep sense of inner Silence being touched by The Other. Internal Breathing alchemy allows me with one breath to feel That.

This morning I allowed the energy to come in and move though my energy body, cleansing, opening, a practice called ‘Big Snake uncoils its body;. The chakras (energy centres) open. There is a centre I have only read about twice. Not part of the usual 7 chakras. One yogi, into Kundalini, just put it in a diagram, another peripherally mentioned a bit about it but his followers don;t seem to have made a big deal out of it. Several years ago it opened for me, quite spontaneously very blissfully and then I remembered the references. When the attention is there, on it and it glows it is very Blissful. But I don;t hear it mentioned. I am no great shakes so I must assume other mystics have experienced it but don;t talk about it because it is a secret.

When I recently told my class in my School of Esoteric Arts about it, they all sat back and expected to get the information spoon fed and were surprised when I said I was keeping the secret at least until they showed some indication of working harder themselves.

This morning it glowed and I felt wonderful. The energy then moved about in my brain. There are many centres in the brain that can get enlivened. Afterwards I felt like I had antenna inside opened up and tuned to all sorts of Bliss frequencies, like my brain software was generating glowing happiness.

If, as seems very likely, that our world is moving into increasing chaos and tragedy are you ready? Can you get centred in one breath? If knowing your Bliss Body is important to handle the incoming energies you will be ready if you can feel it. If not, maybe you will miss them and the joy or, worse, get fried by them.

The Easter message is “I, if I be lifted up will draw all men unto Me.” Not just Christ but you too. If you can do this lifting, your “I” will be resplendent. Your head will be in Heaven your feet rooted on the earth.

In most disciplines there is an external verity and then there is a deeper inner truth. Students understand from their level of experience. As their experiences deepen they will understand the same words in a different way. It is all perspective.

In Tai Chi classes Master Moy would tell a student to “sit; more. The student understood sitting to mean bend the knee and thus bring the buttocks lower. So when they sat lower as they understood his instructions to be, they would bend their knees further. This was physically demanding and their practice became a heavy workout. Young men loved that, lots of sweat. If they kept this up long enough the result was that their spine would open. Their vertebra would spread open especially in the lower back. It is the sort of thing that happens when you do pelvic tilt, except in our style we don;t do that as we want the joints at the hip to open in the front and the back. If you do a pelvic tilt the lower spine opens but the front joint closes.

As the spine opened one understood that “sitting” meant exactly that, that opening of the spine. It wasn;t bending the knees more. That is merely squatting. This is exercise, but external exercise. It means stretching the spine down, bringing the pelvis as though on a plate down. In mere squatting the spine goes down in one piece but in “sitting” the legs can bend minimally but the lower spine goes down and the upper spine stretches up. This is sitting with the spine. If the head goes down with the sit you miss that stretch up at the same time as you stretch down.

Stretching down means sinking into the feet, into the earth energy. Stretching up means getting the energy into the head, stretching into the sky or to ‘heaven”.

As the inner energy moves in this way the channel in the spine gets cleansed. Chi flows more easily from the bottom of the spine to the top. So does spinal fluid. The brain is enlivened. Sinking quietens the mind. It is a letting go. Everything drains down to the feet. You become one with earth energy. You die into the earth. Standing up you resurrect yourself and flow into your head, heaven. You are reborn.

As you become cosmically more tuned more cosmic energies flow through you. Earth and sky are not just metaphors for up and down. Your body does not end at your feet and head. There is a continuum of energy going down and going up. You stretch down beyond the feet and you stretch up beyond the head. If you do this you can feel there is a part of you above your head.

Indeed you surround your body like a golden egg. (Ecclesiastes 12.6, ”Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken… then shall the dust return to the earth” i.e. you die when that golden egg disperses. The Golden Egg sustains you.

As you communicate better with all that you are you also build and maintain these lines of communication.( Ecclesiastes again 1.6” The wind (Chi) goeth toward the south (the feet) and turneth about unto the north (the head); it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.”) Energy moves along circuits. Eventually a great energy in the base of the spine arises and rushes up the spine in an ecstatic flaming gust of fulfillment.

Till then the energy was playing around in the external, being attracted by this then by that, like a prodigal son. Attention was outside, on all the things of the world, all the situations, the responsibilites, the things that make us rush and get us tense. All our goals and dreams, trying to be happy. Seeking it outside.

And all the time the loving Father waited and waited. Then energy loops back on itself and the son says,” I will arise and go unto my Father.” The Father, Shiva, is in the head, the Sahasrara, waiting for the son. And the son rises up and joins his Father in Heaven, (the head and above the head).

And I will say,”I have sinned.” But the father will take me in his arms and say,” Child all that I ever had is thine.” Why the instant reconciliation? because the only sin, the original sin is separation. Feeling separate from That which is within we can never find it outside. We only ever find what we are. When the energy has looped back on itself the circle is complete, you are complete. Order has been restored.

You will be embraced. You have arisen. The energy has risen in you There is nothing more to do but live that, express That.

Arise

She is waiting.

The Joy of that Embrace.

It is Easter Sunday as I write this, the day of the Resurrection, the Risen Christ. Yesterday I fed my bees. Today in the sun of a plus 3C morning they were buzzing around their black winter wrapped hives. All winter it is quiet outside the hives. So quiet you might think they were all dead. But inside they keep it warm and wait for the time of renewal.

Under the mulch my garlic lies ready for the pale shoots to turn green when in a few weeks I will pull the mulch away to give the shoots sun. I have moved my trays of onions, leeks and French shallots to the green house. Inside tomatoes have germinated. On the grass redwing black birds and migrating grackle have found the seeds I put out for them. Two red polls, a couple, got trapped on my porch. I caught them in a tea towel and each lay there so sweetly with their little head sticking out. It made me feel so tender.

As I did my Wild Goose Chi Kung set this morning three flocks of Canadian Geese flew overhead heading north. As above so below! Blessed and miraculous rhythm of life here; the big, the small, all of us creatures living, breathing and finding our spot under the glorious sun. I took off the lid of one of the compost bins scattered around my vegetable garden and peed in the bin. It is a time of renewal, recycling, a rising of the sap and we are a part of it all. Hallejujah!

In the Microcosmic orbit we Taoists circulate energy up the spine from the perineum over the head and back down the front to the perineum again with the tongue providing the link between the two meridians. You can also do it in the opposite direction.

In the Macrocosmic orbit you bring it up from the middle toe, under the soles of the feet, up the back of the leg and spine to the head and then back down to the middle toe. In a class I once, by mistake, said I was going to teach the macroorgasmic circuit and got a young woman quite excited. I used to joke that if I had called my School the School of Erotic Arts I would have been more succesful than as Esoteric Arts.

“The wind goeth toward the South and turneth about unto the North.” This is the macrocosmic orbit circulating the chi (using the breath) between feet and head. Once you;ve got it is easy to do. There are four ways of doing the loop.

I often sit up in the night and do it a bit before going back to sleep. It beats lying awake.

“It whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to its circuits.”

As long as we are alive breath flows and energy moves. If we know the circuits we can build on and use Nature;s design to augment the flow. A stagnant pond doesn;t support life. It starts to smell, so too with our energy. In moving is renewal and better health.

You can circulate energy from the belly button to the back of the spine (Ming Men) and then in two loops back to the centre of the spine. You can feel the power centre start to glow. The kidney meridian and the chi belt store and cultivate sex energy.

(An aside: I was reading on a chat site about some Ayurvedic herbal medicine for restoring sexual vigour. It is banned in the States partly I think because it contains lead. This mixture is probably based on a recipe contained in that old saying “this will put lead in your pencil”).

I sometimes do the 9 circulations of the Internal Pill and teach this. It isa combination of macrocosmic circulation and some other meridians.

Several years ago my friend Richard drove for three days in a battered old car from New Mexico to teach me the Baptism of Fire circulation. It now forms part of the curriculum in my School but I haven;t taught it to any student yet. They need to show the right attitude, the right interest.

This technique uses a particular energy loop, a particular body position and a particular breathing pattern etc that allows the energy to build up in the head and the base of the spine charging each side like poles of a battery (positive and negative, North and South again you see). When the charge becomes large enough energy rushes up convulsively between them. Touch both poles of a battery and you will see what I mean. The breathing becomes rapid, the arms move and then the spasm is over. It is, I imagine, like a woman;s orgasm, except this is not sexual. Physical, yes; but not sexual.

This morning I did it over and over again for half an hour and decided to write a short essay on it.

Richard would say that when Shiva (the North, the head) gets charged enough then the charge in the base of the spine will induce Shakti to come to Shiva. Shakti has no choice. The two poles have become so charged that energy has to flow between them once contact is made.

It is being baptized with fire (Matthew 3.11). The rising energy up the spine can be like a fire. Not painful, an ecstatic gush of flames; or just a rush and a quivering, leaving you full and replete.

Isaiah 60.1 “Arise, shine; for thy light has come and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” As the energy rises you see light in the head and you become radiant, you shine, for those who can see. This is the Pentecostal experience of the disciples when their heads were surrounded by flames.

Moving energy purifies the system, purifies the centres through which it passes. The dross gets burnt. There is a price for this. The price is that you have to deal with the ash that is left in the system. For a while the body can feel tired after a tumultuous experience. You will need rest.

The energy loops back on itself. I say this many times. In looping back is completion. One becomes spherical. As a sphere wherever you move you are at rest and centred. Just as in the centre of an axle there is no movement so at the centre of the sphere is stillness. This gives rise to the feeling of the mystic that nothing happens.

Oh yes the wheel turns, bad fortune, good fortune, you can;t stop that, can;t stop the turning for so long as you are part of life and its ebbs and flows, but, if you are at the centre you will be at peace. Taoists say this all the time. But, of course, what we mostly want is getting the wheel to move from bad fortune to good and then to stand still at the peak of our good fortune. No wave stays peaked. Every peak has a trough. We will never know peace that way, hoping to keep the wheel with its apex at good fortune, because we can not stop the wheel. Each life has its destiny, its parabdha karma that will work itself out. Good fortune, bad fortune, what ever your destiny is. But you can still learn to be serene amidst all that.

When I finished writing this and went out the back door three deer were on the lawn. We looked at each other a long time and then they took off into the forest, white tails flagging me.

One is to try to guide our life to a future we want. This means to become master of our destiny, to apply our focus, energy and intention on the goals we want to achieve. It is not always easy to know exactly what it is we want, for although happiness is a convenient catch all goal the actual way we will become happy is unclear. So often we find that getting there does not bring the happy results we wanted. Nevertheless, trying is the exercise we set ourselves, the path of effort.

We decide what our priorities are and we aim at them. A lot people find some sort of balance between inner and outer priorities. We wrk because we want so much of material stuff and also so much of leisure to read, listen to music, exercise and develop our awareness. This is to be privileged and the privilege should be acknowledged and exercised responsibly.

The second choice involves accepting what life gives us based on the notion of seeking first the Kingdom of God and all else will be added to us. It discards the notion that our present is the product of our past and therefore our future will be made by our actions in the present. Or if ‘discards; is too strong a word, it casts its weight on the side of letting the future take care of itself, like the lilies. This world requires endurance. Take what you get and keep your mind on God. The problem with this is that we can become passive welcome mats for whatever the world wants to throw at us.

Taoists try to find the point of balance amidst opposing energies, walking that razor;s edge of effort and surrender. Too much swing either way, and balance is lost. We need some thin branch to hang on to as we balance on the edge of falling.

Balance in a dynamic world requires constant vigilance; to be yang, assertive, at the appropriate moment; but always ready to turn yin, receptive or retreating, when that is advisable. This way we balance our feminine and masculine and become more rounded as individuals.

There is no code book of instructions for this. By making mistakes we learn. All of us learn that way. By paying attention to how things work out, by our falling, we learn first how to re establish balance when it is lost and then how not to lose that balance. When are we too rigid, when are we too flaccid. All along our intuition gets honed so we start to feel, what is the right response, in any situation.

Gradually we learn where our choices will take us. It becomes complex because we live in a competitive world. Everyone seems to be selling something, or competing for our attention. Finding harmony and right action is a skill, like those graceful parents who can multi task while also dealing with fractious children, which sometimes includes their husband as an extra child.

Sometimes it seems that we live on a planet designed to make it difficult. It seems sad to me how often we will say wryly, “Well that was a learning experience.” This is always when the experience was a tough one. Why can;t our learning experiences be also pleasant ones?

I learned as a young person studying B. Comm LLB at Stellenbosch university to hope for the best but plan for the worst; business advice during a business strategy course. I remain one of those bouncing up persons who can never be knocked down for long; always optimistic and generally enthusiastic, an absolute pain to those who wallow in misery, who go often deeply into mourning like a familiar coat they pull on at the hint of bad news.

I remember telling a friend over 40 years ago that I felt my life was a long ‘thank you; and he replied, “Mine is a constant and loud, ‘Please;”.

One has to find a balance. I;d love to surf, hang glide and fly ultra lights but don;t have the time. I spend several hours each day doing my inner alchemy. Somehow my life revolves around that. It is what really matters to me. But I also do the shopping, plan the meals and cook them for the family, send the birthday cards and all that. I enjoy the company of others but revel in my own.

I don;t get everything I want. That seems to be life, doesn;t it. The clamors of material life around me get only so much attention and never at the cost of my inner work.

If one can balance inner and outer then life becomes a dance. And you become a joy to know.

P.S. So what about a cup of green tea? You can click on the green tea button just below to reach a site run by one of my students; very informative on the anti cancer properties of green tea, the varieties, how to store, how to make etc.

When we have souls that enrich our outer lives our inner beauty will create outer beauty. Our inner harmony will well into our lives with waters that are fresh and wholesome. Deep calls unto Deep. The planes of outer activity will have been flooded by the silt that comes coursing in great waves and our projects will flourish. I yearn for a culture of beauty. But just as gardens slowly wither with drought and repeated drought removes all traces of former green, so lives can get patterned by ugliness, the thorns instead of the blossoms, a cactus that never has flowers.

Take sexuality. If a person;s sexual life is not nourished by the lush creative, then water is not sprinkled on the valleys and peaks and gradually all withers and dies from lack of appropriate attention. One becomes without sexual vitality and charm.

I seem to have chosen an ugly time in which to live. It is not all ugly, naturally, but I feel the ugliness creeping in like a cancerous darkness with our cities, our roads, our military machines and the creativity that goes into horror films, into violence and the awful corrupting, banality of much of life.

We create what we are or rather how we see ourselves. How we see ourselves into that we become. The shallow has a culture of mediocrity, the plastic decoration and not the gushing fragrance of real aroma.

I give a sad glance into recent history. Turkey;s massacre in Armenia (1 million), Hitler, Stalin killing the Ukranians, Pol Pot killing 2 million of his own people, Israel/Palestine, Japan;s invasion of and cruelty in China, China doing the same in Tibet, what the Vietnamese call the American war (2.5 million Vietnamese dead, not to mention the living horror of the birth and genetic defects from Agent Orange), North Korea, Saddam Hussein, the Iraq war, Darfur, the suicide bombers, just ugliness spreading ugliness and strangling lives with hopeless absurdity and degenerate priorities.

We have war driven economies. Utne magazine had a reprint from The Humanist called “The Permanent War,” which was a devastating and gloomy recognition of how the USA has used war or the threat of war (fear of terrorism) to pump money into the military and military driven industries. Eventually the economy knows no other stimulus, a warfare state.

“I am running out of villains,”quipped Colin Powell (before the Iraq war),”I;m down to Castro and Kim11 Sung.” And if Colin Powell felt that imagine what the real hawks felt! Now whenever things get too loose the alert colour can easily be raised.

Money is made from wars and the threat of wars. Money is diverted from flowing into more beautiful channels into channels that make weapons and train violence. How did we come to this? How did we come to accept this? No, even approve it? Where, no matter what Bush did or does he will still remain The Man for most Americans?

Can we no longer recognise ugliness for what it is? A whole country gets ridiculously focussed on how Terry Schiavo lives or dies while at the same time billions of dollars get sucked into killing and maiming. What sort of people have we become? And where will it end?

What is spent on war and destruction is not spent on something else. It is as simple as that. If in your family the priority of spending your income is defending yourselves and not enriching your lives with beauty and harmony and grace, then how did you come to make this decision?

If you watch any theatre of the absurd, after a few minutes you accept the parameters and the absurd is seen as normal. After long enough of dragging chains it becomes impossible to imagine something else. In a family of smokers all smoke, one way or another.

If your soul is rich and full then the ugliness of it all is so evident. We need a revolution of beauty; a culture that extols the natural, the serene, the balance that comes when internal conflict has been resolved, so you don;t fester it on the world.

There comes a time when it is too late, when the garden has finally withered and there is no longer any hope for what could have been. It gets lost in increments. Gradually it dies, not with a scream but in exhaustion.

If we could creatively reduce our population numbers which drives many of our absurdities of excess and imbalance, if we could vote the violent and greedy out of office, and vote for beautiful souls, if we could have hearts and not just heads of corporations and governments then the sort of thing that happens as seen in this link http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/articles/2004/9/1/51972.html

could not occur. The why of that is a shriek.Why do people end up doing such cruel things to other people? Because the ugliness inside becomes manifest outside. Step by step we can go one way, step by step we can go another way.

Taoism flows towards the natural. When you are are at peace with yourself then you are not yearning with greed. To be natural is to be relaxed, to be in tune with the waves of creativity that pulse from God;s heart. You feel God;s in and out breathing.

I don;t know what drives your life but if is not that pulse then you might well be one of those that suppurate poisoned ugliness, those toxic personalities that blight life. There are too many of them, just read any newspaper other than the little locals I enjoy. And don;t be fooled, the Ugly can dress itself up and look cocky and smile winningly, but only if you have lost the eye for discerning bullshit.

What sort of life do you want for your children and their children and the children all round the world? Answer honestly and then DO something about it.

Many years ago I read of the theory that the earth has had the function of liver to the Universe for a while. That means that all the poisons (by which was intended unevolved, problematic beings) have been sent here for purifying. We got the violent, the cruel, the greedy and maladjusted. The cleansing function was due to end and be given to some other world. At that time all those still in need of re education would be sent to that world and those who were well adjusted would create a Heaven on our earth. Maybe?

It seems to me that anyone can, with discipline find harmony and beauty in their hearts. This is to cultivate beauty and eradicate the ugliness inside. When that happens it is intolerable to see the ugliness outside. But when we are ugly inside we don;t notice the contrast. We seek stimulations that are jarring and discordant. Inside we can find that sweet gentle voice of the Eternal that hums with the ever constance of the Always Spring, nourishing waters that lap on our hearts and when we feel that we can weep for all those moments when we didn;t feel That. Then, when we have a choice, we can choose to turn to That for the seduction of the Always I Am. This will be revolution of Beauty. Gradually the Ugly will find no ground inside us for its seeds and our world will have been transformed and the next generation will thank us.

I have been thinking how much I like him and what a pivotal role he played in my life. I last saw him alone, probably in 1974,late at night, on one of those European ATR courses. He had been messing around with me, then the T.M National Leader in South Africa. He was wont to do this with people, giving contradictory messages.This was making me feel unsettled as to my position and his confidence in me. I raised this with him, as tucked up in his cashmere blanket, he lay ready for sleep and said I was unsure of his love.

We met in 1962 (Hochgurgl). I had received word that my father was dying in South Africa and I was uncertain about staying for the months course. Henry Nyburg (Maharishis European right hand man) organised for me to see him alone, right at the start of the course. Maharishi took both my hands in a warm embrace and asked about my father. It was a special moment for me and set the tone both for the course, my first romance with the Absolute, my Kundalini rising and my subsequent frequent interactions with Maharishi.

My last direct contact, en route as an immigrant to Canada (in 1977), was from a phone booth off a Swiss Autobahn as I was leaving Seelisburg, having been given the run around for several days by Neil Patterson (because I had a moustache!) for the promised videos and a video machine so I could see some of Maharishis recent talks. On the phone Maharishi laughed heartily about this and said I could have gone to Canada as their national leader rather than as a bearded philosopher. My response was that that would have put a few noses there out of joint. It was the sort of thing he liked doing.

By then I was well on my way out from the T.M organization having decided, amongst other things, that if enlightenment meant anything it, at least, meant the freedom to be ones self as well as the ability to be ones Self.

Some 30 years later he comes to mind and I still feel such affection for him. He was a wonderful person to know and greatly enriched my life.

I do wonder how much of this comes from the Jungian projection one tends to make on such figures and the reluctance to give up seeing ones Soul in them.

My wish is that, when the time for him comes,he makes a happy transition. I am fortunate to have that warm happy feeling I get when, as now, I think of him and feel so grateful he was a part of my life.

Fraying at the edges or slipping into catastrophe.

As far as environmental and political disasters go I have spent a lot of time bemoaning all that I think is wrong or misguided. One can spiral down into a depression doing that. I have spent time looking forward to an expected human cull brought on by human foolishness.

However, although I still embrace catastrophe as the human choice as means for change, I have started to believe in a new paradigm. This is that there are 12 time lines of parallel realities i.e 12 futures for those here on earth now. This is more than just a biblical wheat and a chaff division. Compatible energies will have a similar future, incompatible energies will no longer be forced to live together. These 12 time lines seem destined to hive off soon. I take great comfort in the thought that I will no longer be sharing my world with incompatible energies. Therefore I get a warm feeling in my heart for my future and that leaves little room for present bitching. There is SO much that is just not right for me here on earth now I could spend all day complaining. It seems better to think happily of the splitting away of those 12 time lines. Goodbye can be such a cheerful word sometimes dont you think?

The site has made me realize that someone can be highly intelligent, informed, intuitive and yet quite possibly be a little mad. However I mostly find the eccentric charming and my life has been greatly enriched by the odd.

What I also like about the 12 futures is that it is not simply a heaven/hell judgement and division. You just go where you are most suited and that seems a good solution. Moreover, as energies for change flood our earth as they currently do, they provide stimulus for the hiving off. They boost what one focuses on, or where ones heart is. Ones life is what one attends to, so what one attends to now will become ones future.

Is all this 12 time lines stuff true? I dont know. Life is mysterious. Do I believe it? Perhaps, and it helps me get through my day.

I just dont recognize the world that so many people seem to be living in as my world any more. If that is to be above the fray then I guess that is where I am.There is some advantage not be passionately engaged with most of what happens Any way I have enough of my own fray to deal with.

1) I could do nothing more fundamental to change the world than changing my awareness and he taught me how to do that.

2) Knowledge is structured in consciousness i.e. what you know and what you experience depends on your awareness.

If I look at the facts the world provides this is hard to prove. But if I look at my personal world it seems valid for, apart from some slips and blips, I see a world of love.

This morning I put some more of my large garden to bed. A frog hopped towards its winter bed under a big pile of mulch, from where it will emerge in the Spring to eat slugs. I greeted it with affection as a companero. Chickadees start their own sunflowers in the garden and in Fall eat the seeds therefrom. They are unfrightened as I walk by and as they flit amongst the 8 foot tall plants I call to them hello sweetheart.Deer munch on the left over carrots and beets Bright winter rye is sprouting to suppress weeds and to become a green manure in spring when I till it in.My well tended soil gives me wonderful vegetables and fruit. How can I not see love in all that balance and ripeness.

I have been taught that when something of beauty is seen to love it, for the earth as we know, like the elves in Tolkien, is passing away. This beautiful earth is apparently vanishing in turmoil and catastrophe. That is one view; the splitting off of the time lines. The world that some people inhabit is just not mine at all so why worry about them? They have their future and I have mine. As I think of my future in a world of love I get a delicious feeling in my heart.

I am currently making a sort of study of Wagners magnificent Ring Cycle. Wotan, the head god in order to provide security for his fellow immortals has two giants construct a magnificent palatial castle. In this act he gives life a twist that will lead to the gods inevitable destruction. He moves every which way to change things but comes at last to the realisation, which he had always suspected, that the end is destined. All he can do now is to choose to participate in the ending and thus in some way choose his own end.

It seems to me we are faced with important choices about our ending and our earths ending. Trying to pretend it is not going to happen is for me not one.

We have choices. We can yap angrily as life passes by or we can grab it by the handful and love it. I think Maharishi has done the latter. He has taken two huge handfuls of life. And once he took my hands in his warm embrace for a while and that has made all the difference.

The Wombat and other Musings.

I watched this film, which is good for children, and then thought of my friend Marguerite in Australia. She is a ‘sensitive’, wonderful with animals, and lives on a communal ‘farm’ in the mountains of New South Wales.

One night she came back and saw a wombat near her door. The next evening it was curled up on the steps with the cat snoozing next to it.. The wombat showed no sign of fear and Marguerite had to take a big step (they can get up to three feet in size and weigh 80lbs) to get over it and into the house.

The wombat is, except for occasional cloudy days excursions, essentially a nocturnal animal, so she was surprised one morning to see it still on the steps in bright sunshine. It was there all day, and the next morning. It didn’t look well. She took a few photos and went to see her vet who was able to diagnose it with a serious ailment and said that untreated it would die in a few days. It needed a course of injections plus pills for 2 weeks.

Marguerite was very poor at the time but wanted to help the poor animal so she sold her TV set to get the money to buy the medicine without any guarantee she would be able to inject the wombat or get it take the pills for the whole 2 week course

When she came home it was still there and she sat next to it and lovingly explained that it needed a course of treatment which involved a prick and a pill to be swallowed. Plucking up her courage, as she had no idea how it would respond she injected it. It stayed immobile. Then she said,’ now for the pill and you must open your mouth’. She put a hand under its chin,and popped the pill in. By night fall the wombat was walking around and was gone the next morning.

However it came back in the evening, got its injection and voluntarily put its head back for the pill.

One evening she took a walk to where there was a wombat hole a few hundred yards from her home. She didn’t see it but heard in her head a ‘gravelly’ voice which said,” Little kind missy. I am better now.”

My sister Jenny in South Africa has a way with animals too. She has lived with a donkey called ‘Bojangles’, a gorgeous Rhodesian Ridgeback called ‘Willard’,a blue parrot called “Blue’ who kisses Jenny and puts its whole head into her mouth allowing her to shut her mouth without complaint.

She also had a crow that adopted them called ‘CrowCrow’. It would fly above her daugher’s head when she walked to school and when school ended came back to fly with her as she walked home.

If Jenny slept late CrowCrow would pick up a pebble and let it roll noisely down the tin roof, doing this over and over again till Jenny appeared.

They had an outside shower for washing down after surfing in the sea. Visiting surfers would also brush their teeth there in the morning and CrowCrow began plucking the toothbrushes out of their mouths and flying away with them.

One day Jenny climbed up to its nest and found many toothbrushes, rings and keys that had gone missing. These were CrowCrow’s treasure.

She eventually got very tired of the morning pebbles rattling down the roof so she and her husband put Crow Crow in their van and drove a hundred miles and released him in the wild.

These are not singular stories but it is useful to remind ourselves of the rapport humans can have with animals.

A month ago during a stroll in the fields I saw a dead coyote.It was such a beautiful animal but I guess some hunter thought it looked better dead. Where I live in Eastern Ontario coyotes are not often seen or heard and now there is one less one to amaze a walker with its presence.

Humans are good slaughterers. With themselves I suppose one could objectively call it a method of population control. We seem to know few others. Wild animals on the other hand allow the natural cycles of food and its lack to maintain a balance in their numbers.

I think ‘Nature’ is going to teach humans some lessons about this balance and the lack thereof.

For myself I yearn for a world where we are the gentle friends of all the species that inhabit our planet. Maybe after all the coming catastrophic changes we will have such a world.

As we find that deep peace, harmony and joy that inner balance gives we might finally become worthy custodians of this suffering Earth.

The last day of the year dawned with a red tinge in the East and a veil of diaphanous clouds that gave the sky that delicate, faint Turneresque colour. 2006 was rung out with rain and rung in with plus 9 and sunshine blessing us all.

As usual I began my forms outside with a centering Chi Kung benediction bringing the energy of the Sky down my body to my feet, and into the Earth, and then up again four times while alternatively facing the four directions, feeling the flow of the Blessing moving gently and ecstatically within.

We live in a simply gorgeous world and many lacking balance, gentleness and the serenity that comes with cultivated internal power do not become it.

For long it has amazed me that there aren't more critical comments on the size of the human population. Few people it seems have read Daniel Quinn ("Ishmael" and "The Story of B", amongst others).

So many of our societal troubles come exactly from too many people competing for too few resources. Where I grew up in South Africa (Western Cape ) the population has increased 10 fold since 1947. 400,000 to 4 million. It is now the murder capital of the Western World and is a place I will be happy never to see again as I prefer my happy memories of childhood to remain intact.

How does one deal with the rapidly changing conditions in the world? In 30 years the Arctic will be ice free and the polar bears will be extinct in the wild. This is cause for tears. Nothing can stop this.

Humans will be beset by one crisis after another for we have chosen catastrophe as our way of change.

I'll tell you what seems wise to me and it came to me some months ago when I started my usual rant on there being too many people to a technician during a bone density test.

This then is what I do when I get emotionally charged by all that goes on. When talk of bombing Iran, Bush declaring martial Law, this conspiracy that conspiracy depress me I remind myself of where I live.

Here, right now I can see "paradise". I have harvested 113 garlic bulbs, am digging red, white and blue potoatoes (my French wife enjoys these colours). My garden is bountiful, full of birds and I live in harmony with my environment. I feel blessed by my situation.

I contribute to Greenpeace, Green Party, David Suzuki and PETA. I send out loving thoughts. The expansion of my Light Body causes itching. I scratch. Meditation takes me to no "I". There is a vast Joyous Space beyond me. Nothing to do, nothing to gain.

The future will be chaotic, but here, in Sydenham, right now, today, it is a beautiful world.

I hope I have done with enduring the downward spiral the negative, tragic news gave me. Humans have made their choice. Suffering will come. Getting depressed before the event doesn't help. In my heart I know peace and joy. Now I would like to be a tonic of good cheer for the world. I have ranted about what is wrong long enough.

There are little miracles. Twice this summer I have heard the most musically charming song from a blue jay. Yes, a blue jay renowned for its unpleasant raucousness sat once in my pear tree and once on the bird feeder and sang so sweetly to me. It was lovely. I thanked it.

So I do my Chi Kung. Circle my hands over my head connecting earth, sky and planets and run the energy down to my feet.

Where I am, where I stand, energy and power are in balance, my heart is at peace, birds sing, the world is beautiful. There is nothing more to be done.

We live during times of an amazing clutter of information, ideas and news. It is a gift of mixed blessing as our consciousness can only process so much, can only focus on what is before it, or what is chattering in the mind, overtly or subliminally.

If you tend to anxieties there are tsunamis of facts, of political conspiracies, future catastrophes and economic uncertainty that will overflow into your life.

We not only know so much of what happens in the world we feel obliged to keep informed. What we are fed probably tends to come from a biased source as the news media is far from free.

If you like channelled material there is a plethora of that, much of extremely dubious merit.

If you are an empath then the chaos and stress of the times seeps constantly into your emotional body even when you stop the clammering news.

It seems to me we have lost the ability to feel the world, partly as a result of our trying to know it factually, intellectually

As empaths will tell you, they will feel how the person talking to them is, quite apart from the verbal content of the dialogue.

I do wonder what the clamour over deteriorating earth changes would be if we actually felt the soil getting dry and hot.

Do you feel kinship with the little species all around you? A rapport with them? Do you feel the tragic burden humans are placing on all life? I don't mean as an idea, an intellectual concept but a physical/emotional embrace of what this feels like.

We are superior in our technological conceits, our muscular resource relationship with life on earth.

Bird song does not flow through us like a poem; if it did we would care more.

Why do I read so often of the need for constant economic progress along with the fear that if humans don't keep breeding ('fucking into extinction' as a friend, Conny Larson, put it) then who will pay the taxes for old age support? It seems so absurd. It FEELS so wrong, so imbalanced, so separate from that wonderful life around us.

If we have lost the ability to feel the world then that has come about because we have closed our heart consciousness. I sometimes cringe when I read all the mushy talk about love and what it can do. It seems to me that love is not an emotional over indulgement but the vibrant fact of that pulsing centre being open. It is a question of the energy flow and how much time gets put into clearing the loops and cultivating the energy. Even love needs the discipline of that.

I daily practise Taoist internal arts. You can read innumerable books, hear countless lectures but it is the daily feeling of how the energy flows that gives growth. It requires discipline and lots of practice. Balance, like energy, is dynamic and is a moment to moment embrace. The ultimate development is not how to hit someone hard but the development of feeling the world. To master fighting is one thing but feeling the world is another and it is superior.

Like bad poetry, talk of love abounds. But read Rumi, stop the talking, start the feeling.

There is often an essential conflict between grasping the world rationally and feeling it like a lover who runs panting after his beloved.

Even while you develop 'your' unlocalised awareness, focus lovingly on the locality of where you are.

Do you realise that the world as you have mostly known it is vanishing? Dying before you