Trigrams After Emptiness

[Anonymous]

Once you are able to work with some amount of emptiness, it just continues to grow with your practice. At that point, you can start to work with the trigrams – not before. Before this you are effectively just putting neigung into forms of movement. You can’t skip this step, but it has little to do with the real subject of the trigrams.

So, what are the trigrams about? Transformation.

Transformation is just a bigger word for change. I like it better in this context because on the most basic level I see the Bagua diagram as illustrating change from one form of manifestation to another. To transform Heaven, ☰ , to Wind, ☴ , you simply transform or change the bottom line from a yang to a yin. You can map this transformation to all sorts of neigung elements.

I’ve posted many examples over the years that probably never made any sense to anyone but ultimately the “instructions always pertain to the lower, middle, or upper tantien”. This quote is from Bruce’s NYC Bagua seminar. The subject of the tan tiens is neigung parts 14 and 15. This type of practice culminates in training with the tan tiens. But that isn’t the end.

Let’s go back to the simple idea of change. If you look at the Bagua symbol as a bunch of forms, you can ask how do I change from the Heaven form to any one of the other forms.

In the Wind palm change, you start by expanding out both arms and legs which is really an expression of the Heaven trigram. The hand that goes out, continues to expand. The hand down at the lower tan tien feels that change from yang to yin. There is a release of energy at that moment that has to do with balance. That release of energy can be used to power your strike or a pull depending on which side you connect your application. More important, this is an example of the mixing of yin and yang or a smooth palm change. The tan tiens are doing the same thing. In Heaven they all expand. In Earth they are all receptive. In Wind you are mixing yang and yins. This is an energetic mix coming from emptiness. Without emptiness it really isn’t a change, it really isn’t Bagua.

From this simple idea, the 64 hexagrams of the I ching could be interpreted as just a more complex version of the same thing. In the end the I Ching is commentary and instructions for transformation from ANY one hexagram to ANY other hexagram. Our Bagua practice can be an expression of this but there are many, many steps and years of practice before this becomes real and born out of emptiness.

[Anonymous]

Thanks James.
It’ll take me a while to digest and practice these points.
Obviously I’ve hardly scratched the surface.
Although it sounds arrogant, but I do have an edge because I do have a sense of “emptiness.”

[Anonymous]

HI Robert,

I hope this helps. It took me a while but this is an attempt at explaining how I organize the trigrams to train the 16 part neigong. In my previous post, “I’ve Got it all Backwards”. I was trying to go backwards from the most advanced topics to simple training of neigung elements. I wanted to put the training in its appropriate context and give an idea where that type of training fits into the stages of learning Bagua.

Here, I was trying to illustrate a much more advanced neigung topic while relating it to the real subject of change.

[Anonymous]

Nice; it’s working.
Heaven to Wind from the emptiness.

I have been moving around the I-Ching clockwise from N to NE to E to SE, etc.
I use the opposite set of trigrams to construct the 4 trigrams:
At NE/Mountain I reach back to SW for Earth.
Kinda hard to explain, but in the NE I end up with:
Mountain
Earth
Wind
Thunder (this one is somewhat arbitrary, it’s Fu Hsi’s Before Heaven arrangement)

Anyway, your method is much more baguaish.

I may have to bug you more to fill in my gaps.

Hey, Bruce just announced Workshop on Mountain on San Francisco in March.
That’s a possibility for me.

[Anonymous]

I plan to attend the Mountain Palm Change workshop in March providing my schedule allows it. I hope I see you there.

Jim

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