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Hi,
I’ve listened to the first chapter a couple of times. Fascinating stuff. It’s really good to hear Bruce’s unique insight in to this.
I’ve also done the initial meditation a couple of times. At first I found the instructions a bit confusing. You breathe in experiencing life and then breathe out feeling the life leaving. Ok.
However then later you feel the life exploding inside you as you breathe out. My interpretation of this was that you get the “explosion of life” within the changeover point at the end of the exhale as the life starts coming back in. Was that anyone else’s interpretation ?
I’ ve got similar question.
My interpretation after a few days with this meditation to “explosion of life” is the feeling of lifeless rising and filling the body and life leaving. However, when moving further to ends of exhale/inhale and to merged feeling of breathe this question seems to cease…Taavi.
btw. Great Thanks to Bruce for sharing this.
Same question here. Would be nice if somebody in the know could chime in.
HI Folks,
Heres my humble opinion….
The meditation is to get you to relax into the interplay of yin and yang… ex. life and death… a place thats not one (yin) without the other (yang)… relaxing your… self… into the paradox… a place that manifests the ten thousand things.
Just as a bagua form is actually one move…. see the interplay of yin/yang, life/death, inhale/exhale as one… Relax your nervous system into this interplay of energies.
As oneness of in- and outbreath I gave in Matthew’s String One of many answers.
Another Refers to the Quote on Heaven and Earth from Charter One and their common origin. A hint to theIr oneness also after the descent into creation of the pre-heavenly order of the I ging into creationthe Iearth ofPakua.
AXEL
So so far i am understanding that Tao by name is not the Tao because
because some thing in this Nature is unphathomable what i mean is naming it puts limits and well Tao is every thing and anything?
From what I understand it is transcending the concepts of life and death, and to focus on tai ji from which springs life and death at the change-off point between in-breath/out-breath and out-breath/in-breath …
little more linearly/clearly:
the tao is wu ji or the first object, then tai ji is the second object, then liang yi or yin/yang interplay is the third object (each coming from the other hierarchically) su chian the fourth object and bagua the fifth object…kinda like a hierarchical matryoshka doll that you don’t open but kinda leads you into the next one hence the confusion with differentiation/distinction/definition between them as separate entities, a mobius matryoshka doll in which the only way you can distinguish them is by the quality of that thing you are sensing…but it might be easier than that depending on how you orientate yourself toward it (you gotta make these concepts your own)
tai ji isn’t life or death…it is that transcendent object that gives birth to the yin/yang interactive object of life and death…but I could be wrong.
a quote I found explaining the hierarchy of manifestation: “Those who have studied this philosophy will know that the belief is that all life, motion, or energy begins from a “void” or Wu Ji. When the Wu Ji begins to manifest movement, the Tai Ji is formed. When the One energy of the Tai Ji begins to reveal its opposite polarities (Yin and Yang), the Liang Yi is formed. When the two polar energies (Yin and Yang) of the Liang Yi combine to form four energies, directions, movements, or principles, the Si Xiang is formed. When the Yin and Yang combine once again to form eight combinations, the Ba Gua is formed.”
This is my take away from what Bruce said about meditation regarding chapter one. Please correct me if I am wrong.
Christians says that we all come from God, and will one day return to God. That is not much different from Daoist saying that we come from Dao and will one day return to the Dao, which is this undifferentiated “thing” that is the source of all creation and manifestation of our cosmos.
For most of us, our current level of attainment might as well be zero, so trying to “return to Dao” is not something that is possible. We might as well begin with something that is easier to accomplish, and that is Taiji.
To know Taiji, one has to observe ying and yang. To observe ying and yang, one inhales and exhales repeatedly and focus on the exact moment when inhale changes into exhale and the vice versa. That exact moment is where one finds Taiji.
I think that is what Bruce is trying to say. I think that is how I am going to approach this meditation for chapter one. But if I am seriously flawed in my understanding, please correct me.
Thank you
CTK
In listening again to Chapter 1 what really jumped out at me was the line “Call them both mysterious” in regards to outer manifestation of desire and the inner essence of consistently without desire.
I’ve always felt that the outer manifestations were understood or explicit to the implicitness of inner essence and its inherent mystery. Yet I can’t help but thoroughly agree with this line, that outer manifestation and all the stuff of the world at large is quite mysterious, too. It makes me quite aggrieved when I consider it not so; I tend to want to figure it all out.
I know in the era we live in we want that theory of everything and scientific thinking to explain it all, but I find comfort in the mystery of it all, no matter what it is. Not as something to solve but something to delight in or marvel at.
While I understand omniscience to be possible in the body of the Tao or universal enlightenment, I find that this is so because one has accepted that it’s all a mystery. That any spiritual progress comes from realizing different layers of the mystery of it all; emotional maturity as a realization of the mystery of emotions, mental stability or when the false leaves only the true remains as realizing the mental mystery. The mystery of psychic perception and karma, in our society, is certainly that (so mysterious, in fact, that many espouse they don’t exist…go out of their way to disprove the existence of psychic and karmic perception). Indeed, that personal enlightenment is realizing one’s own mysterious nature.
In this way, this line brings to my mind the idea that spiritual progress isn’t a mystery to solve but a mystery to accept, to realize. Or, pardon the pun, it isn’t a mystery to solve but dis-solve.
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