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A second stage of gathering vital energy was to tap into the Yin and Yang energies of the natural world. The Tao gives life to nature and humankind, and cosmic energies are condensed and exhaled in natural process. The rising energies can be portrayed in art in the crackled lacquer panels, in marbled ceramics, wood and stone, in the e? dragon veinsi? of rock strata and the lines of landscape, and in esoteric calligraphy, cloud, bird, constellation and grass scripts, notations for music and even perfumes. The Yin energies of the earth are breathed out as vapour, mist and cloud, or exuded as moss and fungi. The Yin mists and clouds fall to earth again as Yang rain. On the tops of mountains the adept can absorb Yang energy from the bright Heavens, or drink the dew that falls from the moon. Rain and dew are fluids born of the intercourse of Heaven and Earth, charged with cosmic energy. Emperor Wu of Han built bronze
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? pillars with Yin bowls on their tops to collect the dew condensing from the sky for his elixirs. Cloud fungi are female effluvia from this cosmic intercourse.
The ultimate physical absorption of sexual energy is from the human sexual act itself, and the Taoist adept might employ erotic skills with a partner, mutually absorbing the sexual fluids and juices, to build vital energy. The wealthy man could use concubinage and polygamy to cultivate his sexual activities. The symbolism of sexuality therefore pervades Chinese Imperial art.
The vase or bronze vessel is a symbolic vulva, as is the peach, the peony blossom, the golden lotus, the artemisia leaf, pink shell, or vermilion gate. The male organ has all the conventional phallic representations, but is also alluded to by the horned and whiskered dragon and by the plum branch. The sexual fluids may be symbolised by plum blossom falling onto the green moss, dragoni? s semen congealed as jade,
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? white dew covering jade steps. The fluids may be caught in vulva shaped Yin cups, made of deer or rhino horn, decorated with dragon shapes. Sexual orgasm is the bursting of clouds and rain, the showering of plum blossom, the dragon swirling among clouds. Si Wang Mu, the Western Goddess, the greatest of sexual adepts, came to King Huai in a dream. Giving herself to him she said e? At dawn I am the morning clouds, at evening the falling rain. i?
If exercised caringly and with seriousness, tenderness, and skill these practices were potentially mutually satisfying. However the whole attitude easily led in men to a desire for intercourse exclusively with young girls in the belief that absorbing the fluids from their orgasms would give the greatest sexual energy. Confucians and Buddhists disapproved strongly of the abuse of such women, who were then left to grow old and lonely in household service, or were rejected and abandoned. Equally the meditative Taoists pointed out the potential
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? dangers of self-delusion in taking such a route, particularly since the whole craving for immortality by these means could easily destroy rather than enhance the tranquility and harmony of the mind and spirit.
It can appear that these men were merely preying on young girls. This is the feeling a Westerner gets from reading about Genjii? s relationship with the child Murasaki, tender though it is, she who e? is like the wild carnation wet with the fresh dewi? . It becomes easy to understand however the attraction of the elderly Emperor, Hs ? an-tsung, to the young Yang Kuei- fei. A clever woman could easily manipulate such a situation. A further dimension was the practice of the man avoiding orgasm in order to conserve the sexual fluids while encouraging orgasm in the partner that could equally lead to an unnatural one-sided and inharmonious relationship.
To the meditative Taoist much of this was irrelevant. The adept began instead by sitting
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? contemplatively in harmonious surroundings, looking quietly at paintings of mist and mountains, or gazing at a garden full of convoluted rocks and green mosses. Or contemplating a carved stone object, say a mountain scene with hermits, trees, and deer, made from lapis lazuli, turquoise or jade. The adept then moved on to breathing exercises similar to Tantric Yoga, aimed at arousing the e? subtle bodyi? of meditative energies. The goal was to harness the stored energies of the mind and body, and combine them ultimately with the cosmic energies to achieve harmony and e? immortalityi? .
The energies are conceived as circulating between three centres one above the other in the body. The lowest centre is below the navel, the middle centre is behind the solar plexus, and the higher centre is behind the eyes. The fundamental energy, stored by sexual practise or abstinence or otherwise, in the lower centre, the vital energy of the middle centre, and the
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? spiritual energy of the upper centre, are transformed, as cinnabar is transformed in the furnace, to generate the elixir.
The adept initiates regular breathing to arouse the subtle fire of energy that will circulate between the centres. A meditative thought track conceives of the e? subtle bodyi? as a flow from the base of the spine up the back to the head, and down again through the front of the body to the sexual organ and back to the base of the spine. When the breath, the continuous flow of the thought-path, and the energy become one, the spine becomes an ascending track of energies that rise as Yang to fall again as Yin.
The e? inner alchemyi? moves and combines the three energies in a series of e? firingsi? and circulations until the combined energy rises up to the head to join with cosmic energies to create a luminous Sun and Moon of radiance. An essence gathers in the mouth that must be swallowed. This may echo the swallowing of the tongue in Indian practices. The essence congeals
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? to form a seed in the lowest centre. While external breathing ceases, internal breathing continues, the radiance enters the seed and creates the Taoist foetus that breathes cosmically. It becomes a Taoist child that rises to the head and merges with the cosmic energies of the Tao. The Immortal is then e? re-borni? from the top of the head. There are resonances with Western alchemy in the radiant marriage of the Sun and Moon, and in the transforming energies within the e? cruciblei? .
The Taoist adept becomes an Immortal, and flies on a stork or crane, or rides a dragon or tiger. The Immortals play in the form of children in the green-gold Western Paradise, eat pine- seeds and fungus, drink rain and dew, and are at one with the cosmic energies of the universe. The Emperor who achieves this becomes the divine mediator between Heaven and Earth, Emperor on Earth and Immortal in Heaven, while remaining in human form between the two realms.
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? Hs ? an-tsung and Yang Kuei-fei may have practised some or all of the sexual techniques, and the ageing Emperor may have eaten the drugs and essences, and sat and meditated in his attempts to become an Immortal. He withdrew increasingly from government into the private realm, perhaps concentrating exclusively on these esoteric methods. It is impossible not to feel a gulf between the intricacies of these difficult and artificial e? ritualsi? and the great humanity and natural life of the poets. Going back into the world of the Ti? ang poems and later Sung landscapes is like going back into the woods and mountains, clouds and rivers, into the fresh air and subtle colours, out of the constraining darkness of the Imperial palaces and corridors.
Wang Wei merges his Buddhist quietism with real appreciation of nature and escapes into it as a refuge. Tu Fu is moved by landscape as it illuminates the Confucian predicament, the man of integrity floating free in a world of error and
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? confusion. Li Po is also a poet of freedom, in his case of total freedom, but strangely perhaps Li went closest to following the ritualistic practices of the Taoist adepts, fitfully and erratically, alongside his attempts at meditation through the study of Chi? an Buddhism. He was attracted to esoteric Taoism by its magical aspects, by its promise of immortality and Paradise, and by its charm and enchantments. Perversely Li, the least dedicated to public life and also the least conformist of the three poets, might best have understood the position of the ageing Emperor. The representative of Heaven on Earth practised the rites, and chased Immortality, in order to fulfil his role for his people. He who, like Genji, e? held such a position in life that freedom of action was not allowed him. i?
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The Tao is the unknowable. e? The bright Way seems dull. The Way up to it seems the Way down. i? says the Tao Te Ching. e? The greatest shadow is formless. The Way vanishes in having no name. i? The Tao in Western terminology is Energy and the Matrix of energies, the e? stuffi? of the Universe and its transformations. It is the microcosmic Vortex and the macrocosmic Void. Its manifestations are the metamorphoses of Energy in detectable forms and processes, the e? myriad creaturesi? that we name. Paradoxically the brilliant theories and experiments of Western science as they clarify the knowable also reveal the silence of the unknowable.
To separate a cause from its effects, or an object from its surroundings, or a thought from thinking e? createsi? the cause and the effect, e? createsi? the boundaries of the object, e? createsi? the fully formed thought out of the stream of
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? ? thinking. The chair we touch is not the chair we see. The e? touchedi? chair is not the e? seeni? chair. We assemble and link these views of the chair in our mind. Every e? causei? is itself a nexus of causes and effects, a whirlpool. We select the boundaries of causes and effects to map onto our boundaries of objects and processes. The expressed thought itself is an encapsulation in some language, even a physical or artistic e? languagei? , pulled out of the thought continuum. Its unexpressed tentacles stretch out into surrounding thoughts and language. The word echoes amongst other words. The verbal reaches into the non-verbal.
When we defocus for a moment from our delineated worlds of known boundaries, clear causes, and agreed language, we can easily find ourselves at a loss. In the physical world we are disturbed by discontinuities, e? noisei? , the non- repeating patterns of water and clouds, dust and smoke, fire and light. The vortices of the world are also the e? weatheri? of the Universe. The
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? boundaries of the world are fractal boundaries: as in Zenoi? s paradox they are finite in space but immeasurable. Complex movement is fluid, elusive, evasive, subtle. It creates forms out of nothing and collapses them again. The tiniest effect, the smallest perturbation, may cause massive change. Nature repeats, but not exactly, traces endless paths but within bounds.
The quantum model implies not merely that the future of the world is unpredictable because we cannot compute its changes fast enough, but that it is ? 397? 38? . ,? ? ? unpredictable. Within the e? wholei? of Nature are domains where uncertainty and randomness are inherent, where repetition is bounded but non-repeating, where levels of detail regress infinitely. The random, the uncertain, the infinite, and the vastly complex, conspire to make our universe personally ungraspable, despite those domains of our intelligence where we have created theories, demonstrated regularities, inferred e? lawsi? , and built ourselves a world we can grasp. What we
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? can predict at the statistical level escapes us at the level of e? realityi? . The e? thing-in-itselfi? is beyond us. In that sense, since it is ungraspable, there is no e? thing-in-itselfi? .
In our relativistic universe, moving objects, and objects in gravitational fields have their own e? locali? time, dimensions, and energy. Our e? locali? perception of them depends on information, such as light signals. When we perceive them their clocks run slower than ours, as ours do to them. Dimensions contract. Mass, which is Energy, increases.
The results of what we measure will depend on relative velocities, on gravitational fields, on inertial effects. The e? observeri? , the point from which we observe, becomes crucial. Not because the key e? lawsi? of physics run differently in different domains but because each observer, each different set of observers, each domain, sees a different universe. Subtly, or in some situations radically different. We can navigate e? ouri? universe, but we cannot see and touch e? the Universei? directly, or see it whole.
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? We can imagine and visualise it relativistically. We can construct diagrams and model it mathematically. But we cannot, ever, e? grasp iti? entire. That there is a universal e? Nowi? how can we doubt? But it is intrinsically not observable as a single e? state of everythingi? . There is no absolute framework from which to observe it. The stone dropped from the railway carriage window appears to drop vertically to the passenger in the moving train, but describes a parabola to the watcher on the embankment. Which path does it e? reallyi? follow. That is a Zen ? 4,3. Meditation on it brings illumination.
Events that happen simultaneously for one observer, can happen sequentially for another distant observer, because of the difference in the length of the paths the information travelled to reach that distant observer. There is no universal simultaneity of observations, no universal e? Nowi? . That is a second Zen koan. Meditation on a koan creates first confusion and frustration, then enlightenment. e? At firsti? said Chi? ing-y ? an
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? e? I thought that mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers. Later, on considering these things, I realised that mountains were not mountains and rivers were not rivers. Eventually I achieved enlightenment. I came to understand that mountains are mountains, and rivers are rivers. i?
In our quantum universe the sub-atomic world is strange. There is no satisfactory visual model of the entities or continua that make up the microcosm. They appear and vanish. They carry with them a cloud of other entities. They seethe in a sea of reality that appears only in observation. The statistically predictable pattern is made up of intrinsically unpredictable events. The uncertainty principle prevents knowledge of the precise e? statei? of the universe. In measuring one attribute we destroy information about another. No sub-atomic entity can be observed twice. What is observed is always a different entity. All events are unique. Randomness is at the core of the microcosm. Only statistical
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? prediction is valid. The observer changes the observation and is a crucial part of the observation. The e? particlei? that e? musti? go through one hole in the two-slit experiment appears at the screen having e? travelledi? as a probability e? wavei? through both holes. The pattern of the interference fringes dictates where the particle can appear on the screen. Its precise location is probabilistic and unpredictable. Is it e? reallyi? a particle or is it e? reallyi? a probability wave? This experiment is also a Zen koan. Enlightenment e? realisesi? what is strange. It e? finds the sun inside the rain, draws water from the roots of firei? .
The world of our mental processes is also inpenetrable to self-reflection. The conscious mind cannot e? seei? its own subconscious processes. The sources of our feelings, motivations and affinities are therefore not totally knowable. We absolutely have no language for feelings other than the language of how they affect others and the world. What does
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? a e? feeling-in-itselfi? feel like? I know but cannot tell. I only hope you also know. We try to evoke the feeling through art, through action, through the spaces between words. Emotion and sensibility create image and situation so that image and situation may in turn re-create sensibility and emotion. We conjure in order to communicate, between the islands of our selves. The mind is a hand that cannot grasp itself, a mirror that cannot reflect itself, a process in time that can never be an object in space. e? You will not grasp it by thinking about it. You cannot realise it without thinking about it. i? says Zen, of enlightenment. And again e? What is the meaning of Reality? Wait until there is no one around and I can tell you. i?
Even Time is elusive and ungraspable. Our local time is created locally by the movement from one configuration to another configuration, from one set of events to another set of events, of the energies that make up our local universe. How can there not be a local e? Nowi? where
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? events occur? We measure time through regularity, through recurring e? identicali? oscillations. We agree to meet at a local time, at a distance from e? Nowi? just as we agree to meet at a local place, at a distance from e? Herei? and amazingly we do meet. For us time e? flowsi? in a direction because events succeed one another. Configurations and events including our eye- movements and thoughts appear in a specific order. Yet there is still only the e? Nowi? . Neither past nor future exist. The past configuration is not here. The future configuration is not here either. Yet past events e? must have happenedi? . We infer them from cause and effect. We remember them in the mind. They have left their traces e? bound ini? as information and configuration in the present. Future events e? will happeni? because their macrocosmic causes are visible in the present.
Relativity theory says that since time intervals can differ at different speeds for different observers then one observer can age
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? more slowly than another does. There is no universal e? Nowi? only local ones. In this sense there could be time travel into anotheri? s future. We could leave and then revisit our societyi? s e? Nowi? when less of our years and more of its would have gone by. We would have re-entered the e? Nowi? of our society without having experienced its intervening moments, like the sleeper waking. Though it would be profoundly strange it would not be travel into our own personal future. Our own personal future is always not here, not yet. It is always ungraspable.
Could we travel into the past, and so get back to a previous configuration? By that would we mean that all processes would continuously backtrack, undo and reverse themselves to a previous e? Nowi? and e? Herei? ? Then we would still perceive that reversal appearing in order in forward time. The film that is run backward still runs in our forward flow of time, even if what it shows is a reversing process. Each reversed
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? moment of the physical past, would be a new e? Nowi? from which a forward future would insist on unfolding. So our perceived time would still run in the one direction. The future is not of the same kind as the past. The future is always possible. The past is always consumed. Every new configuration is the next moment. Every past configuration is no longer a moment.
How could the processes be reversed? The universe has no intention, no will to initiate such a reversal, and no universal information about the totality of its past configurations. We perceive processes that achieve disorder from order, irretrievably dissipating energy in the process. We perceive other processes that achieve order from disorder requiring energy in the process. Disorder stays disordered unless energy is added to create order. One type of process is reversed by the other type of process. Even if the mathematical model looks the same e? with a reverse of signi? , losing energy is not the same as adding energy. We can feel that deep in
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? ourselves. Order is not merely disorder reversing. Order e? decaysi? into disorder but is e? createdi?