You DOn't Spin Your Chi When You Meditate

You DOn't Spin Your Chi When You Meditate
Quite a few people always ask me about various Tao school, qi-gong,yoga, Tibetan, even sexual methods for spinning the chi within the physical body. Or they tell me of Sufist or Sikh methods, based on yoga techniques, for trying to force the chi to arise.

They read old translated texts talking about the chi flows through the chi channels and nadis, particularly the microcosmic and macrocosmic circulations mentioned in Taoism or the channels mentioned in Tibetan Buddhism, and because it's all so NEW they feel they've discovered a great secret and the key to successful spiritual cultivation. They think, "Wow, I finally found it. This stuff must be what I've been searching for as it will produce all these strange effects and they're spiritual results!"

Folks, you don't need to know any of that stuff. Actually, most probably it will tend to lead you astray. In fact, it's more than likely to cause troubles by deflecting you from the important thing, especially if you don't have a good teacher.

If you cultivate correctly, all the chi movements necessary for cultivation will happen naturally just as a vacuum sucks up air. Just save up your sexual energies and cultivate emptiness and your kundalini -- your real chi or vital energy -- will naturally awaken and all these things will happen. It will awaken, start coursing through your chi channels to clean them, and all those marvelous things you read about will happen. But they're only a stage of purification of the physical body. Even if they happen, you still have to cultivate samadhi andultimately enlightenment.

When you think about, the only ontological spiritual path that has validity is and must be mental resting, rathe rtthan spinning chi or chakras. Sure that stuff happens, but you don't have to do it, you don't have to know about it, and experience shows that those who fixate on it tend to cling to form and rarely make any progress, so go with the tried and proven ways instead of wasting your efforts..

On the other hand, to focus on yoga methods AS THE PATH breaks many rules of cultivation:

(1) you're playing with thoughts and sensations,
(2) you're bringing consciousness into the body rather than letting it remain non-local
(3) you're usually creating mental realms of delusion to some extent
(4) you're focusing on the body rather than consciousness,
(5) you're wasting time because it doesn't lead to anything.



Consider this.

Did Shakyamuni Buddha ever tell you to rotate your chi, or play with sensations of chi and consciousness?

He surveyed hundreds of cultivation and meditation methods in ancient India, from which many of these tantric techniques are derived. At the same time, he desperately wanted us to succeed quickly at cultivation, but never once advised people to do these practices after having practiced them all. What does that tell you (and don't say he didn't know about these techniques -- just go read his story)?

Did the Zen school ever mention these things and say they should be practiced?

No! In fact, Zen masters went out of their way to tell students to ignore these techniques and their results, and you can easily see that in its heyday, more Zen students reached enlightenment (not samadhi but enlightenment) than almost any other school in existence.

What about Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu for the schools of Taoism?

What about Socrates or Confucius and Mencius, all of whom became enlightened? Did they tell you to focus on chakras or your chi and so forth?

No, no, no, no and no again. This is not spiritual cultivation but cultivating gong-fu and potential functions of the body. Yes, you can do this to lay a good foundation for the path, but the original nature is outside of form and phenomena . That's what you want to get to.

Frankly, t hese spiritual greats never mentioned these practices because they tend to deviate people from the correct path. A deviant path is something that looks for enlightenment outside the mind, and that's exactly what we're doing here. We're playing with the energey currents of the body, which do indeed exist and do produce gong-fu, and to the detriment of higher progress because you never end up letting go of the fixation you're creating.

Did you ever notice that lots of artial artists have storng chi but it's all "dirty"? Taht's because they cultivate their chi and spin it this wayor that, but because they have no emptiness they simply end up recirculating pollutions.

First please recognize that your body's natural and correct chi flows, and more, will become ignored and transpire naturally when you start cultivating correctly ... and "correct cultivation" means cultivating an empty mental state. It does NOT mean cultivating a state where you are amplifying or clinging to sensations or observing the body all day long.

Cultivating awareness of the body?

That's another practice that will tend to get you nowhere. It doesn't mean you can't use such a method to attain samadhi, but most people who follow this technique do so incorrectly and once again get nowhere. What you want is efficiency, what will work for you!

As to playing with body energies, most people just end up playing with the "wind chi" in their body (called "fan chi" in Chinese) and create realms of mental delusion mixed with sensations.

All this trouble, at least as regards the Tao school, started because in the Sung dynasty in China. Some Tao masters, wishing to help later generations, started writing autobiographical accounts of their progress and later students, thinking this is what's supposed to happen in cultivation, started trying to force these circulations into initiation. They thought you HAD to force them into happening.

This basically mirrors the Tibetan idea of the "resultant vehicle," in taking the results of the path and trying to make them into a causal force for the path, but applied to Taoism. But as Nan Huai-chin -- recognized as an "enlightened master" of the Esoteric school AND Taosim-- always says, the Tibetan tantric practices usually just lead to failure and certainly to more disasters than can be imagined. They tend to destroy the culture of countries rather than elevate them.

Take a look at Zen, on the other hand, and it's elevated things wherever it's gone. That is, as long as it went somewhere with an ENLIGHTENED master. You can forget about looking for any true Zen master today. Except for Nan Huai-chin, no one is left (but of course they all claim it). Typically in Japan the title of enlightened master is handed down on a piece of paper, and is meaningless. In the later days of Zen, people would purchase such certificates, too.

The same logic applies to qi-gong practices, which are just Indian yoga pranayama (breathing practices) combined with concentrations on thoughts and sensations. They never lead anywhere ... and I've met tons of the "top" qi-gong "masters" from China. Not a single one had samadhi or pre-samadhi and never will with the methods they follow. People sit next to them and feel uncomfortable because their chi is all screwed up.

Same with many Indian yoga masters and students I've met. They know all these specialize yoga techniques, but their chi is dirty as can be and they still have no samadhi because they never cultivate emptiness. It's a pity--the traditon is right there and they still don't have the dharma. But go read quite a few Hindu biographies of Hindu masters and you'll see countless stories of students coming tot them with starnge notions of proper cultivation, and then the teacher teaching them how to empty their minds to attain samadhi.

Yes, i'ts true you can produce some unusual results with qi-gong, and move the energy currents fo your body at times, but who said you couldn't? You can with pranayama breathing practices! You just have to do them. You can even learn physical yoga gong-fu techniques of all sorts, where starange powers will come out, but what will it win you? You still die, and then have to start all over again without having dealt with the fundamental issue.

The big thing is, who said that clinging to your chi or playing with your vital energies was the spiritual path? Such practices never lead you to get the Tao or even the very first dhyana. To get tot he first dhyana, your chi mai must all clear and then you rest in emptiness rather than cling to spinning. So which qi-gong master has the first dhyana? No one!

These practices were the most materialistic form of cultivation left over after the Cultural Revolution and the Chinese, with everything else destroyed and the desire to state they had something of their own, promote the heck out of basically nothing. Everyone does that, so it's to be expected and understandable. The Chinese want to be proud of something, so slap a few pranayama techniques together with martial arts, some "practice virtue teachings" and you have something you can take to the masses.

But a route to enlightenment or samadhi even? Forget it. Ridiculous. Search the holy books of religion -- where do you see the instructions to go spinningyour chi? Yes, you'll sometimes find them describing the fact that your chi moves, spins or rotates for early stages of the path, but at the higher stages they're all talking about emptiness cultivation, in one form or another, but use different words to do so as would be expected.

Qi-gong? Same old stuff -- nothing, absolutely nothing new inside it but a big chance to promote something with which to make money. The Chinese themselves know very little about their own spiritual culture and the methods available from other countries so of course it's easy for them to be blind about the big picture and about how little they have in what they are promoting, and what they're missing that's actually IN their culture and is the real thing.

But the truth is, bad currency drives out the good, and the REAL stuff is never popular. The real stuff takes time, effort, wisdom, patience and practice.

If you should engage in all sorts of practices where you use your mind to spin your chi, why didn't Lao Tzu or Chuang Tzu also mention them? Chuang Tzu said that cultivation was "forgetting about material things and the human body, viewing birth and death as a unified whole, making all things equal and dwelling in the formless."

All the ideas of Taoism are based on "quiet sitting" instead of playing with one's chi and sensations. The ideas of Wei Po-Yang, the great Taoist unifier, involved "cleansing the mind and retiring into secrecy (emptiness cultivation)." Where is there a spinning of chi and chi channels in this?

It's all a matter of cultivating mental peace. That's a code word phrase for emptiness, no wandering thoughts, no-mind, empty mind, absence of mental fire, killing the monkey mind, stillness, and so forth. Different words, same object, which is the entry way into samadhi and then with wisdom, possibly enlightenment.

Master Nan always states that anyone who cultivates a quiet mind will naturally feel the chi start to pulsate through their channels, and that these are physiological reactions that naturally occur in quiet psychological states. Happens to me all the time. Happens to all my friends who cultivate and cultivate correctly after a certain period of time.

No big deal...so what?

There's nothing strange about these results as they only verify the initial effects of quiet cultivation. It was only by the Ming dynasty that the original lofty methods of Taoist cultivation had fallen from their profound sublimity to mistakenly focus on the chi channels. Big mistake ... go see The Insider's Guide to the Best and Worst Spiritual Paths and Methods and you'll not only understand how Taoism went astray, but you'll find all sorts of other traditions and see where they went wrong and how they tried to correct themselves over the last few thousands of years. Usually they went looking for samadhi, or physical immortality, or superpowers or strange mental realms/heavens and found none were the Tao, so had to correct themselves.

Happens everywhere. Everything degrades over time as the purity is lost. Nothing lasts forever.

The Zen school recognizes that gong-fu phenomena do indeed happen but since they occur without any special efforts and are the just the passing scenery of the path, they are ignored just as are every other type of phenomenon that arises. That's why the Zen school produces more enlightened successes than any other spiritual school in existence. It's extremely high, which is why there are virtually no qualified Zen students today. It seems we all need too many explanations and aren't willing to put in the work of Zen.

Confucius and Mencius never bothered to talk about these chi-rotation practices that are popular either. The most Mencius said is that you should cultivate your chi to a state of fullness (sexual non-leakage required once again). So where do you find the "great ones" saying to do this? Like Chu Hsi who destroyed true Confucian cultivation with intellectualization, it's the intellectuals who don't know what they are doing, and want something solid that produces a physical result (rather than the real Tao), who go off and encourage people to cultivate this nonsense.

When I was young I did it, too. I didn't know any better. Those spinning instructions or descriptions were all that was available in books. That's the type of stuff that gets translated because no one wants to translate the wisdom stuff (since no one will buy it and they don't understand it). But it's just wrong. I could give you a thousand reasons why, but the big thing is when you correct someone who's been doing that and teach them true emptiness meditation, they get immediate results they've been seeking for years. Then they wake up when they see a bit of emptiness and moan the fact they wasted years of efforts.

Buddha never mentioned these things because they are just the phenomena that happen when you "harmonize the four elements of your body." They only deal witht he wind element. That's how Buddha explained it. You cultivate meditation, the chi channels (wind element) and the other elements transform and become harmonized. End of story because it's such a low stage on the path.

Buddha called all the low stages of transformation a transformation of the four (five) elements of the physical body and harmonizing of its nature. That's all it is because if you do that you get samadhi and then you never talk about that stuff again. But people mistake this stuff for the path and think it's the way TO GET SAMADHI, which it never does. These ancients who wrote about these things wrote about what happened WHEN THEY CULTIVATED EMPTINESS.
Enough is enough. Folks, skip all that nonsense. Don't waste your precious time. Find some technique that helps you cultivate one-pointed concentration. Find some teacher to orient you (you only need 5 minutes to get it down right), and then practice the heck out of it, letting go of your mind and giving it a natural rest. THEN you'll make progress. The rule is frequency + intensity for meditation progres or Method + Practice Effort + Time + Patience = Result.

Promise!