Everything Furthers…

Warning! Intellectual BS is coming…

I’ve been thinking a lot about the phrase “everything furthers” and what it could possibly mean. At this point, I think it primarily describes the ever flowing nature of the tao. But who knows and what does that actually mean? Even if this is an accurate statement, what does that have to do with Bagua?

At the moment I think of consciousness as expanding continually in all directions. This is the primary energy of Chien, Heaven that is the foundation that Bagua is built on. The really strange thing is how this expanding energy includes every direction and shape within it. Imagine that your etheric body is a sphere surrounding your physical body. Further, imagine that it is comprised of myriad smaller spheres each expanding as well. It is a little hard to imagine but this expansion creates both the up and out flows as well as the in and downward flows of energy. It isn’t just that a single sphere has parts that are expanding up or down or in every direction. All of these spheres are expanding into each other. They are interacting. Not just the adjacent spheres, every sphere is colliding with every other sphere. Everything in the universe is connected to everything else.

Chien is first a single expanding sphere and eventually includes every possible sphere in the universe. It can be seen in the largest structures of the cosmos and at the smallest conceivable subatomic particle level. In Bagua we want to experience this flow in a very real, concrete way. We don’t want to create thoughts. We want to experience this ever flowing thing directly through our consciousness.

To understand Earth (in and down), you have to focus only on the side of the spheres that are expanding toward your center or going down. It’s like looking at a rotating circle but only focusing on the edge that is moving down. A rotating circle has parts that are moving up, down, left, right, etc. A sphere simply adds another dimension and makes it a little more difficult to imagine, but these expanding spheres create the inward flow. It is all one thing.

Consciousness has a funny property: it can be conscious of other consciousness. So, your hand can feel your etheric body and the etheric body can feel your hand. As we “open up”, our heart-mind begins to do just this. The heart-mind feels more and more while at the same time that consciousness feels what is feeling it. It really isn’t seperate in the first place but we can perceive things as seperate. When you drop your mind into different parts of your body, you are doing exactly that. You are choosing a point of view. Choose multiple points of view and you can experience multiple flows simultaneously in every conceivable pattern: up, down, left, right, front, back, in, out.

Kun, Earth, can ultimately be viewed as the archetype of two bits of consciousness interacting and “playing” with each other. When you perform the double palm change there is always the sense of each hand creating the movement of the other. There is an undeniable play between them. It expands into everything interacting with everything else simultaneously.

In this context you could think of your essence simply as your unique point of view at some place and moment in time within that flow. Similarly the energy of Mountain requires a unique point of reference to establish its balance and stability. It’s not surprising that the 7th body, the body of individuality, is the subject of the Mountain palm change.

These are big concepts. They may be the very foundation of our universe and the art of Bagua, or just a bunch of BS…who knows?