Advanced seminar – a student’s report

Day 10

Our last day here is finally a sunny day, to remind all of us that no matter how bad it is, life always will eventually turn to the good side.

At 8:30 some went to the temple to burn some incense as gratitude for taking part of this seminar in this very nice place. It is true, we all felt more than welcome and it seems the temple feels already like home.

The wooden bed actually is very nice for practice. Now I understand why in the Chinese accounts about practicants in the old times it is written they did a lot of practice in bed. With a hard surface, the bed is as good as the floor, but the elevation offers some protection against drafts so sitting in bed is very advisable. On the wooden bed, of course…

Today is a day to summarize our experience here. Untold about, the temple priests kept ceremonies almost every day, we heard heavy drums starting 8:00am and sometimes continuing during our morning meditation. The trips to the caves were not so difficult as I thought still for some of us, with injuries at legs, they were so. I feel now, before the morning class, that I made another step towards understanding the philosophy and the practice guidelines of Chinese taoists.

The morning lesson was very interesting, new stuff about the 4 kinds of perception related to the 4 kinds of light, all these being referred to as xin fa or the methods of heart:

zi jue – shi guang which means perception about self related to the visible light
gan jue – xing guang which means perception by senses related to xing light where xing light can be yin or yang depending on our state of wakeness or sleeping.
zhi jue – shen guang which means perception of knowledge related to the light of shen
wu jue – ling guang which means perception of void related to the light of ling

Just what kind of perception leads to others is still a mistery, it seems that in different situations they all flow in different patterns.

Despite of all our technological advancement the inner mechanisms of the human brain (and heart) are still not understood completely, not even by taoists, after so many hundreds of years of study. This is a field for research and may be just the very field that allows humanity to take a new leap into a higher degree of civilisation.

The following meditation was very stable, just a little bit more difficult to focus while searching for the balance between wu jue and gan jue/zhi jue…

On afternoon the lesson continued to dig into xin fa with different levels of elements. This theory is hard to explain, hard to understand and master mentioned he waits for us to come back in 40 years to hear a more perfected version of it.

The meditation was shorter but more focused on xing gong, something very helpful to do before we attempt to solve important life problems.

After dinner is our time to go apart so we have to be thankful for those 10 days and hope for many more like this in the future.