Songshou

One last image of Xi Wang Mu. Here she is with a tiger (in this painting a regular tiger--though she is closely associated with the white tiger in ancient Chinese tradition).

Here is a ceramic painting of Xi Wang Mu riding her phoenix. The white tiger is also her special animal.

I had a very nice meditation tonight which I'll share. While doing MSW, I decided to contemplate the Queen Mother of the West (Xi Wang Mu). I started feeling a bliss more than usual for me; and on top of that the image of a peach came to me and the taste of it in my mouth. I can still taste it. When Sifu wrote that GMDW told him Flying Phoenix was a Daoist practice, the idea came to me to focus on Xi Wang Mu, who is the preeminent Daoist Mother and the bestower of prosperity, longevity, and eternal bliss. Anyway, it was a wonderful experience. The Daoist sage Zhuang-zi wrote, ""The Queen Mother of the West obtained it [the Dao] and took up her seat at Shao Guang [mountain]. No one knows her beginning; no one knows her end."

As I practice Flying Phoenix, it becomes clearer to me how appropriately it is named. The "feng" (phoenix) relates to happiness and well-being; health and vitality and fertility and creativity. It's a quantum increase in life-force, that nourishes and strengthens both our inner spirit and our outer body. Maybe that's a bit vague, by yogic standards--but so far that's what I'm feeling.

Hi! I haven't (yet) seen this insight elsewhere, but in ancient Kabbalist literature they have recognized about 54 (if I remember rightly--from the book "Meditation and Kabbalah" by Aryeh Kaplan) four-letter permutations of Yud, Hey, and Vau (representing the 3 Pillars of the Tree of Life) However the full number of possible permutations is 81. In Taoism, though not as well-known as the 64 Hexagrams, there are also 81 Tetragrams (using solid, broken, and twice-broken lines for "Heaven", "Earth" and "Human"). These Kabbalist 81 Tetragrammatons can be placed on the Tree of Life as 81 energy relationships between the 9 lower Sefirot -- in this matrix, Kether the "Crown" remains above as prior to manifestation and energy relationships. The 81 Tetragrams of Taoism are equivalent structurally to the (possible) 81 Tetragrammatons of Kabbalah: solid line = Yud, broken line = Hey, twice-broken line = Vav. Just as the Taoist 81 Tetragrams are composed of 9 Bigrams, so the 81 Kabbalist Tetragrammatons are potentially composed of 9 Bigrammatons (one for each of the 9 lower Sefiroth). Maybe next time I'll post some drawings to illustrate this. It's quite interesting!

And just to finish my thought, in line with the principle of "wheels within wheels", each of the 9 lower Sephiroth includes aspects of all the other nine--therefore 9 tetragrammatons for each of the 9 lower Sephiroth. And 9x9=81. Using just HOKHMAH as an example (and using Y, H, V for Yud, Hey, Vav): HOKHMAH (its Hokhmah aspect) YYYY HOKHMAH (its Binah aspect) YYHH HOKHMAH (its Hesed aspect) YYYH HOKHMAH (its Gevurah aspect) YYHY HOKHMAH (its Tiferet aspect) YYVV HOKHMAH (its Netzah aspect) YYYV HOKHMAH (its Hod aspect) YYHV HOKHMAH (its Yesod aspect) YYVY HOKHMAH (its Malkhut aspect) YYVH From another perspective (in a Yang/Yin mode), you could say, for example, YYHH is HOKHMAH leading / Binah following. And so then, the opposite HHYY would be BINAH leading / Hokhmah following (or fulfilling, etc.) The tetragrammatons for the 9 lower Sefirot by themselves just repeat the two-letter sequences: YYYY (Hokhmah), HHHH (Binah), YHYH (Hesed), HYHY (Gevurah), VVVV (Tiferet), YVYV (Netzah), HVHV (Hod), VYVY (Yesod), and VHVH (Malkhut). These are SACRED codes. Just as King Wen formulated the 64 hexagrams, but his nephew the Duke of Chou later interpreted them (and later generations added further insight), the holy and virtuous meanings and uses of these will need to be both intuited from within and revealed from above. But in this Age where such systems have been, perhaps must be, made public, and Kabbalists, Taoists and others have revealed much that was formerly kept secret, it's worth setting out this matrix for those who can meditate upon it, for the glory of God and to bring God's kingdom down on earth as it is in heaven. Those who study the Sefirot deeply and broadly enough will surely receive insights about how the Sefirot relate to each other in these 4-letter codes of Yud, Hey, and Vav. Just proceed with love and reverence for God and God's Will, and with deep-seated Awe toward the holy Letters (Yud, Hey, and Vav) which are Conscious as God is Conscious. Let God's Letters call us their "friend", as God called Abraham his "friend", for our right-use-ness of them to bring in God's healing and resolution of all problems, all crises. (Of course, those who misuse or abuse God's Letters and become their enemy will pay the penalty.) (Of course, if written in Hebrew letters, each tetragrammaton is written from right-to-left, in reverse to what I wrote here with Roman letters.)

Hi! I think I made good progress this weekend. I have just 3 more (advanced) seated meditations to learn (I should know those by my birthday on Sept. 12) ; and I reviewed and now have down all the basic standing positions. I'll practice everything I know each day this coming week, while I watch the 2 intermediate standing meditations and get prepared to learn them and add them to my practice. Then in several weeks, on to the long form meditation!

Hi Michael! For some reason, the Kabbalists never explored all the possible permutations. They did use some of the permutations for meditation, healing, etc. Kaplan doesn't say much about that, though. I'm familiar with Derek Walters' translation. He (or the publisher) makes one error in his chart: reverse-labeling the once-broken and twice-broken lines. Correctly: once-broken is Earth, twice-broken is Humanity. The other translation by Michael Nylan is more complete, but the publisher (despite the author's pleas to have it corrected) misprinted several tetragrams in the chart and throughout the chapters of the book, so the illustrations are full of errors. (There are corrected charts available on the Internet.) However, at least the book has the once-broken and twice-broken lines correctly labeled! Printing this book seems to bring out dyslexic tendencies! Anyway it's interesting how close in concept the 81 permutations of Heaven/Earth/Humanity are to the Kabbalistic threefold model (3 Pillars, 3 Elements, Father-Mother-Child, 3 Father letters, 3 Mother letters, etc.) As I intuited it, once you place Keter "above the fray" (above or before Manifestation--and Daat is beyond Manifestation, on another dimension), you start with Yud on the Pillar of Mercy, Hey on the Pillar of Severity, and Vav on the Pillar of Balance. You end up with 9 bigrammatons that interact to form 81 tetragrammatons. So, for example, the most important tetragrammaton Yud Hey Vav Hey is an interaction of Hesed --> Malkhut -- which might be interpreted as God's Mercy descending and expressing in Earth. The 9 bigrammatons are: Yud Yud = Hokhmah Hey Hey = Binah Yud Hey = Hesed Hey Yud = Gevurah Vav Vav = Tiferet Yud Vav = Netzah Hey Vav = Hod Vav Yud = Yesod Vav Hey = Malkhut Put them on a Tree of Life/3 Pillars diagram and you'll see the pattern more clearly. What we end up with is 81 Patterns of God's Spirit in Manifestation (manifesting from Hokhmah to Malkhut). Kabbalists explored some of them, at least 54, though I don't know what they said about them other than the little Kaplan writes--and I don't know if they may have used another matrix, since this is just my intuition and not likely the only approach!

Hi Blue Phoenix! In my experience, the white-robed Kuan Yin and the White Tara are two forms of the same Being (Chinese mode and Indo-Tibetan mode). For that matter, Tibetan Buddhists often call Kuan Yin "Chinese Tara". I don't know by any experience I've had who the "goddess" is who appeared to Feng Tao Te and gave him the FP practice. For myself, I first found FP not long after I made some significant vows to P'u Hsien, to whom Mt. Ermei is consecrated. But certainly I'm very close to Kuan Yin! I've "downloaded" into me so many things about Kuan Yin over the last 30 years or so that's it's a challenge to say exactly what my practice is. But it includes the various aspects of her named in the esoteric tradition (i.e., her 42 saving powers, 10 hearts, 12 treasuries, 10 vows), various of her 33 manifestations. And various seed-syllables, and sacred animals, etc., associated with Kuan Yin and Tara. Also at times meditating on her 64 Changes (i.e., substituting the syllable or character "Kuan" for the solid line and "Yin" for the broken line. Also using her longer name "Kuan Shih Yin" and substituting those characters for the solid, twice-broken, and broken lines of the 81 tetragrams. Also since I meditate on the Tree of Life, placing most of these aspects of Kuan Yin on the Kabbalist Tree of Life as well. So you see, I'm pretty well "marinated" in Kuan Yin, haha. Anyway, for me it's Tara/Kuan Yin, when Kuan Yin is experienced as Feminine. -- Songshou

As best I understand it, these are Flying Phoenix meditations that GM Doo Wai taught to Jim Lacy (now deceased) before they had their major falling out (there are different versions of what happened and I'm sure it's not completely black-and-white). I do not know if Jim Lacy, or others, or GM Doo Wai himself demonstrates the meditations on these different DVDs. Jim Lacy and GM did film some joint practice demonstrations; they were apparently quite close for a long time. My own view is to get down what Terry Dunn teaches so wonderfully and responsibly. GM Doo Wai condemned Jim Lacy publicly, and Sifu Terry isn't going to give credit to or recommend anything Jim Lacy demonstrated. If GM Doo Wai demonstrated, himself, that's another matter, though Sifu Terry probably still wouldn't recommend them. (There was some contention about other DVDs a few years ago in the FP Forum, I noticed). I do not have any of these ironpalm.com DVDs so can't speak for them. I have the DVDs that GM demonstrated, sold by Sifu Dan LaRochelle. They are expensive, of course, and produced "on the fly"; and GM doesn't slow things down or break things down for us. I consider them a valuable record; ANYTHING Grandmaster demonstrated deserves to be preserved for the future, in my view. I think that if we could have "downloaded" everything GM Doo Wai knows of Flying Phoenix meditations, he knows a lot more about it than we will ever see revealed! We are so fortunate that Terry has given us a coherent system to learn.

--Hi Jox! A couple years, I think. Never made it to any seminars, just studied the audio courses (with the Qigong videos that accompany these). Michael Winn said, himself, many times on the tapes that without moving Qigong it's very hard to "actualize" Taoist Alchemy in you, as opposed to just mentally sitting and visualizing Taoist Alchemy. However, as I mentioned, it's a complex meditation path and it just doesn't work for me, or I can't make it work for me.

Hi! I'm new here, started some Flying Phoenix a few years ago but drifted away from it. At present I've re-learned all the basic standing and sitting meditations (they came back quickly), and the standing power meditations; and I'm learning the advanced sitting meds, too. The tangible FP energy started right up again as though it didn't need to get re-acquainted with me, The main thing now for me is just to learn to relax thoroughly and more thoroughly! I plan to learn and practice the standing moving meds (vol. 3 & 4), but I am VERY partial to seated moving meds, so I will be doing the entire Monk Serves Wine sequence (all 9 that Terry has released on video) everyday as soon as I finish learning them all shortly. I have to admit, I'm a seated moving med "junkie"! (Maybe because I stand and walk all night at work.) This post is a hodge-podge of thoughts on recent posts, so bear with me. Regarding Michael Winn's (and his teacher Mantak Chia's) Taoist theory, I listened to almost all of Michael Winn's audio courses. His use of multiple "shen" uses the word as "intelligences", i.e., each organ system has its own intelligence). Wholeness is achieved by integrating all those intelligences, as a first step. Beyond them there is a core Shen (Ling Shen) that corresponds to our word "soul". The Ling Shen is, or needs to be, the controlling Intelligence. But it's a VERY complicated meditation system, and it didn't work for me experientially. I got a lot of theoretical knowledge from it, but not any actual experience (and I visualized a lot of this and that, yet didn't experience much of this or that, lol). It may work well for some people, just not for me. I too loved the movie ARRIVAL. Fantastic concepts--we need more films like it. And why not a SEQUEL!! (After all, in the far future they will need our help). I am starting to devote a at least couple hours a day to FP. I'm almost 64 and solitary and haven't anything better to do, haha (though I still have to work 40 hours a week). I just want to radiate whatever will help others in the time I have left on earth. I do strongly feel a Presence behind the FP. Maybe it's the "Goddess" or "Immortal" who taught it to Feng Tao Te, I can't say for sure. I'm very strongly connected to both P'u Hsien and Kuan Yin--maybe the FP practice comes from P'u Hsien. I first encountered it after taking some significant vows to P'u Hsien. And even though I moved away from the FP for a time, in the meantime I practiced some similar simple meds I learned from GM Doo Wai's video clips. Anyway I'll keep you posted! On the subject of "enlightenment", briefly. I think it's a tricky business. I think some people have "Enlightenment" experiences, and maybe think they are "Enlightened" (a state). But there's peril. You may have an influx of Spirit that expands and inflates your mind and awareness...but it may also inflate your personal ego. If one can let go of the inflated ego, then maybe one will truly soar. But some people who claim to be enlightened can also be extremely petty, controlling, bullying, dishonest, and suffer from, I think the condition is, "grandiosity". (having an exaggerated belief in one's importance,sometimes reaching delusional proportions, and occurring as a common symptom of mental illnesses, as manic disorder.) So may the Great Spirit preserve me from that sort of "enlightenment"! It's why my name here is "Songshou"-- "Let go", to remind me to Let Go of any such "enlightenment" if I ever get to that point. Finally, for anyone out there who is enough of a Kuan YIn or P'u Hsien enthusiast or devotee, and also into the I Ching: both names are a Yang/Yin or Tao/Te polarity, (Kuan +/Yin -) and (P'u+/Hsien-) if you look closely at the meaning of the syllables. And so you can reconstitute any I Ching Hexagram using either the syllables Kuan/Yin or P'u/Hsien instead of solid/broken lines. That is, if you want to channel your I Ching meditations through either of Them...since either of them contain within them all 64 Changes. All the Best to you all, Songshou 松手

Hi! I'm new here. I've been doing Buddhist and Taoist mantra and meditation, and some qigong, for many years. I'm not a martial artist. I have a particular interest in Flying Phoenix Qigong, which I've practiced a little of and plan to practice a lot more of. I look forward to learning more from visiting this website. Thanks! -- Songshou 松手