Gleaning Meaning

[Anonymous]

For too many years I”ve been forced to glean the meaning of Liu’s system from tidbits of information that have been peppered throughout time and space. In this post I’m going to attempt to explain how you can organize the trigrams around the progression that Bruce laid out in the “Strings of the Tao” CD.

* Stillness movement. Movement stillness.
* Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form.
* Balance
* Tai chi space
* Stability and chaos
* Compassion

In a previous post I mentioned that I”ve found roughly 8 ways to create emptiness. I could post on each of them and try to describe them in detail. From one perspective, I’m really doing the same thing over and over – creating a balanced yang and yin. The meaning of the whole Bagua diagram could be summarized simply as to complimentary opposites create the space in the middle, emptiness.

All of the Taoist phrases above are just increasingly sophisticated ways of achieving that goal.

You could organize the trigrams to follow this progression. When you are learning it is almost impossible to understand the next phrase, for example – form is emptiness, emptiness is form – until you’ve understood the previous phrase – stillness movement, movement stillness.

But it all starts with trying to understand what yang and yin represent. So the order of the trigrams that Liu’s palm changes is significant and maps the progression.

First you start to understand what yang is in the Heaven palm change. Next you start understanding yin. In the Wind palm you mix the two, but Wind is about movement. So, I think you are trying to find the emptiness that is created by moving your chi in very specific ways to create emptiness. All of the various ways I’ve found to create emptiness by moving chi through various channels in various patterns, comes down to understanding how balancing flows of chi in complimentary patterns creates emptiness or stillness. In some case the meaning is more literal and you actually create a point of stillness and move in opposition to it. But in the end, it all is movement stillness, stillness movement.

Thunder is also movement. It is sound and vibration. I’m not positive, but I assume it is just more variation but importantly it uses the two sides of the body to generate emptiness in the core channel.

I can’t explain how I create form. It is in the mind, I just do it. I don’t know how I learned it. I think Bruce taught it to me when we met a few years back but I really don’t know. Somewhere along the way I picked it up from Bruce. The basic idea is creating something, a form. It is unfortunate that they use the same word, emptiness, to describe its opposite. In the Fire palm you start to learn how to create form. Again, there are a bunch of different ways to do it, but it all comes down to form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Here the meaning of emptiness is closer to nothing. Nothing is the complimentary opposite of form, of this thing you create with your mind. There is always a contrast between form and emptiness. In the middle you find the tai chi space, emptiness (not to be confused with nothing).

In the Water palm you start exploring the movement of yang to yin and yin to yang. Bruce taught the Water by this year by teaching down and up. But, the actual energy of the trigram isn’t specifically about up and down. It is about the smooth movement any two opposites changing into their opposites. This is the basis for manifestation. The deeper meaning is when the change from yang to yin and yin to yang occurs simultaneously. That another form of balance and stability.

Water is more advanced then Fire because you can make form change to emptiness and emptiness change to form. They flow back and forth just like any other chi flow. So Water includes all of the possible variations of movement stillness as well as all of the possible ways to express form is emptiness as well as achieving balance in an incredibly fluid, dynamic manner.

In Mountain you really start to know what emptiness is. It is growing. It isn’t complete, but you are understanding more and more. Bruce has said that Mountain is the beginning of being multi-dimensional. One interpretation of that is that you start performing movement is stillness in multiple directions simultaneously. It could also include using all of the previous techniques in combination to increase you conscious understanding of emptiness. Certainly you gain an increasing sense of self and what you control. This begins to contrast with everything else, the chaos.

It is possible Lake is just taking every know yang and yin and simultaneously attempting to perform them on each side of the body to create as much emptiness as possible.

The genuine desire to balance your personal sense of control and power with the rest of universe creates the ultimate yang/yin pair and can create compassion which is the ultimate expression or form of emptiness.

Gotta go.

In

[Anonymous]

Ok,
I think I now know what you mean by “tai chi space.”

To me, it’s like my concept of “fading into the fullness of emptiness.”

I do not know any of the specific Palm changes (except the Single Palm change).
Most of my understanding of the nature of the 8 directions of the
I-Ching comes from Olsen’s book, “Tai Chi According to the I Ching.”

I like your ideas about “Mountain.”
So, take Mountain for example.
Like you, I also see stillness in Mountain.

Mountain:
3. Yang
2. Yin
1. Yin
(reading from the bottom up)

Mountain/Gen is in the NorthEast.

4. Mountain
3. Earth
2. Wind
1. Thunder

3. SW is the direction opposite NE.
Earth/ Kun is in the SW.
So I associate After Heaven Mountain with After Heaven Earth.
4 vs. 3

2. Next I associate SW After Heaven Earth with its SW Before Heaven Wind.
3 vs. 2
Wind is the “Before Heaven” opposite of After Heaven Earth.

1. Finally I associate NE After Heaven Mountain with its NE Before
Heaven Thunder.
Mountain is King Wen’s “After Heaven” which is opposite of Thunder,
Fu Hsi’s “Before Heaven.”

To be sure it is complicated,
Or as Bruce says, “multi-dimensional.”
but only takes about 15 minutes each morning to completely orient to the 8 directions.

From all of these opposites comes stillness.

The NE wind is “still.”

From doubt/chaos comes stability/harmony.

The Taiji posture for NE/Mountain is “lieh,” Split (Thunder).

For Mountain I use the Bagua energy Posture 2, Holding the Lower Tantien while walking the circle.
Each step must be Daoyin–embracing opposites.

I agree with yinbagua and Andrew Nugent-Head that walking the circle
10,000 times is not advance Bagua unless each step integrates opposites.

Enough is enough.

Bob

[Anonymous]

“The movement between yin and yang eventually in terms of being able to do it very well and especially going beyond it, has no meaning unless the space from which it is born becomes a reality.”

from Bruce Frantzis’ commentary on “Strings of the Tao”

[Anonymous]

You can tell if you have found the emptiness I’m talking about if it starts to make you very strong, if it helps you access and perform everything that Bruce has ever taught without exception.

[Author]

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