The stages of Taoist internal spiritual cultivation were transmitted by Mantak Chia to his Western students starting in 1981. Master Chia received his transmission from a Taoist Hermit named One Cloud, who achieved the breatharian state.
One Cloud lived on chi alone for many years while living in a cave on Long White Mountain (Changbaishan) in northeastern China. During the Japanese War in 1949, One Cloud walked across China, and settled in the mountains behind Hong Kong’s Taoist Yuen Yuen temple. Mantak Chia studied with him in his small mountain hut in the early 60’s. One Cloud, born in 1880, left his body at age 96 in 1976.
One Cloud originally taught Seven Alchemy Formulas for Cultivating the True Immortal Self. The Healing Tao’s knowledge base expanded so much in the past 30 years, that we decided in 2010 to simplify things by dividing the huge 1st Formula into three foundation stages. The new total is Nine Alchemy Formulas. Seven is the number of human evolution; nine is the traditional Taoist number of completion. Nine invokes the integration of Humanity with Heaven and Earth. One Cloud’s traditional principles of cultivating Tao remain unchanged. Our hope is to make the alchemical process more transparent, deeper, yet easier to access.
One Cloud’s Alchemy Formulas to Cultivate the True Immortal Self are similar to those mentioned in thousand year old texts known as the Tao Canon (1160 books of the Taoist “bible”). These formulas are attributed to Lu Dong Bin, one of China’s revered Eight Immortals and the patron “saint” of Inner Alchemy. The core methods themselves are undoubtedly thousands of years older, passed down by strict oral transmission and held in deepest secrecy. It took many generations of masters to refine the great spiritual truths into practical alchemical stages. These Alchemy Formulas are the spiritual crown jewels of Chinese civilization.
The practices encompass everything from meditation, to movement arts, psychic development, martial arts, ancestor Karmic balance, energetic healing and communicating with nature.
These formulas build on one another so do not be intimidated by the amount of info. You could practice just the first level and still reap great benefits to body, mind and spirit.
1st Formula of Inner Alchemy
Lay a Foundation of Love & Balanced Chi Flow
Inner Smile cultivates our chi as a deep act of self-love. Yin practice allows to love our body, its tissues, our organ spirits, and to dissolve past energy patterns (positive and negative) that unconsciously shape our reality. Yang practice is to radiate a loving Inner Smile out to our friends, family, community and Nature. Inner Smile is the simplest and most profound body-centered Tao practice to grow our sense of harmony. It strengthens our inner virtues (moral compass) and integrates outer life with inner meditation and delivers true peace to our soul.
2nd Formula of Inner Alchemy
Cultivate Harmonious Feelings & Sexual Energy
2a. Iron Shirt 1: Internal Rooting & Bone Breathing to ground the Energy Body. Grounding is a major challenge for many westerners. Standing postures connect the skeletal structure to the flow of earth chi. This rooting is essential to managing sexual and emotional energy and allows one to absorb cosmic chi as one progresses.
2b. Fusion of the Five Elements 1 is about cultivating our original or true feelings, before they are corrupted by resistance and ego struggle. This is accomplished by harmonizing the five phases of chi flow (wu xing). Fusion 1 practice transforms negative emotions into positive, virtuous chi flow. It harmonizes the Five Spirits (shen), the biological-psychological intelligences of the personal self.
2c. Healing Love/ Taoist Sexual Secrets: conserves, recharges, harmonizes, and spiritually guides sexual energy. Taoist medical sexology heals sexual dysfunction, the bedroom arts harmonize couples love life and guard their health. Women use the jade egg to strengthen and own the spiritual space of their womb. Women learn to reduce monthly blood loss with breast massage and Ovarian Breathing.
Men learn to build sexual power by re-circulating internally their semen’s essence with Testicle Breathing. The conserved sexual energy is guided by both men and women into the appropriate body center (dantian) or energy channel (microcosmic orbit, core channel, etc.). Sexual energy, when refined, is the primary fuel for the alchemical process of accelerating human evolution. It makes the physical body radiant and stimulates the mental/emotional bodies to be highly creative and positive.
3rd Formula of Inner Alchemy
Balance our 8 Cosmic-Psychic Forces
3a. Iron Shirt 2 (Tendon Power) & Bone Marrow Neigong 3. These practice strengthen our body’s functional structure by storing long-lasting chi and clean the bone marrow by charging it with sexual energy to stimulate the production of fresh blood cells.
3b. Fusion of Five Elements 2 and 3. The pearl activates the yin-yang pulsation of the eight cosmic forces (I Ching trigram energy) that flow into the Eight Extraordinary Vessels of the human body. These deep energy channels form the blue print or matrix of our personal Energy Body, and supplies the twelve regular meridians with chi.
When these eight psychic energy channels are activated, they collectively open the Macrocosmic Orbit (or “large heavenly round”) and can heal at a very deep level. Faster and far more powerful than acupuncture or herbs for healing chronic illness and ancestral (genetic) issues.
This practice opens deep awareness of chi field beyond the body, hence its reputation for awakening psychic powers (known as the eight Siddhas in a parallel Indian tradition). We activate the Nine Cosmic Spirals that allow us to expand our Energy Body out to the far edge of the Cosmos and receive guidance and renewal from the universal chi field.
4th Formula of Inner Alchemy
Inner Sexual Alchemy: Heal our Male/Female Soul-Split
Lesser Enlightenment of Kan and Li (Water & Fire), also known as Inner Sexual Alchemy. This practice presupposes some skill in the Taoist Healing Love sexual cultivation art of semen retention for men and partial lessening of the menstrual cycle in women. It involves a shift from horizontal Fusion of the Five Elements (Post-natal or manifest chi) to vertical axis coupling of Three soul aspects: Fire-Inner Male, Water-Inner Female, & True Earth-Portal of Self-Creation.
The Kan & Li method of “spiritual self-intercourse” couples primal Fire and Water chi in the body. This is the first and critical stage of dissolving the personal mind-body split (and its resulting diseases). We unify all male and female soul fragments in the lower belly cauldron (dantian- center of gravity). This alchemical internal sex clears out all our old outer sexual relationship patterns, and creates a feeling of spiritual pregnancy that can last 9 months. We physically feel a deep body bliss known as the formation of the “immortal embryo”.
When primal fire and water chi are “steamed” in the belly, it produces Original Chi that dissolves deep genetic patterns and false yin and yang syndromes in our personality and body. It opens our Inner Eye at all levels of the body’s core channel, thus enhancing and our ability to “see” inside our body and matter. A special Black Pearl meditation allows us to dissolve our shadow side’s Inner Demons, by taking them on a journey into the pre-natal portal.
5th Formula of Inner Alchemy
Sun–Moon-Earth Alchemy: Complete Our Ancestors
Greater Enlightenment of Kan and Li (Water & Fire), also called Sun-Moon Alchemy. Horizontally we integrate the 5 inner essences of the personal self with the five directional forces of the planetary self. These are identified as the Five Dragon Spirits of Earth, a.k.a. the spirits of the North, South, East, & West meeting in the Center of Earth, at our solar plexus cauldron. We work within Deep Earth, and learn how to harmonize with the greater energy body of Mother Earth.
The powers of the Sun and Moon are vertically coupled to “cook” the Directional spirits/Dragons. This dissolves many patterns trapped in the cycles of Time and spiritually births the “immortal child” or the greater elixir. We experience our reborn inner self as our young Inner Sage playing in the global astral field of reality.
This dissolves the boundary between the adept and Nature (including human nature). It dissolves geomantic (feng shui) blockages in the Earth’s ley lines and heals our bloodline’s patterns long buried in the bones of the earth and purifies our own blood of ancestral traumas.
6th Formula of Inner Alchemy
Planetary and Soul Alchemy: Shape Your Destiny
Greatest Enlightenment of Kan and Li, also called Planet and Soul Alchemy. This is One Cloud’s third Kan & Li (Water & Fire) formula. It uses planetary polarities to cultivate a more refined ling, The ling is roughly equivalent to the western notion of “soul”, but viewed as an evolutionary process. Your responsibility as a human being is to “grow” your soul, not to “save” it.
This alchemical process begins with a cosmic Fusion of the Five Elements. It horizontally integrates in the middle cauldron of the heart our personal self, the 5 vital organ body spirit-essences, with the 5 planetary forces of the Solar system Self. This is “living astrology”, in which cosmic forces are interiorized inside the body. The planets are evolving storehouses for the collective archetypal soul forces of humanity. We can experience them directly through planetary tones (music of the spheres), and download their vibration to more deeply divinize our own vital organ spirits.
For example: we directly experience and make friends with the planetary spirit of Saturn, ruler of the “Higher Earth” element. It teaches us how to hold the core unity of living matter and balance planetary and stellar forces of manifestation. Successful practice removes all fear of death and dissolves deep karmic patterns of resistance and struggle that plague humanity. In effect, we are completing Humanity’s natal chart. This process allows us to clearly receive and transmit our soul’s inner “solar logos” or Way of knowing. The planets ground a deep opening of our inner heart, so we can become a vessel to receive the Spirit of the Sun. The hidden yin nature of the Sun (Yin within the Yang) and the hidden yang nature of the Spirit of Earth (Yang within the Yin) are vertically coupled internally to mature the heart of our Inner Sage.
7th Formula of Inner Alchemy
Star Alchemy: Unite Soul with Over Soul
Sealing of the Five Senses, also called Star Alchemy. This unifies the five shen, the five streams of personal consciousness that operate through our senses, with the five forces of the collective Stellar Self, in the West called the Over Souls. The body of our stellar mind can be viewed in the four quadrants of fixed stars in the night sky, originally symbolized by heraldic animals (Black Turtle, Red Phoenix, Green Dragon, White Tiger).
The fifth, the quintessence, is the Purple Pole Star in the center of the sky, with the Great Bear of the Big Dipper marking the progression of the seasons as its handles rotates like the arm of a cosmic clock. These personal and stellar essences are fused in the upper dantian, the cauldron in the head. This is the process of our Inner Sage attaining the stellar logos, celestial level of immortality.
The pure open space connecting the three cauldrons is integrated. This stabilizes the celestial axis and activates what Lao Tzu calls the “Great Tone”. Profound peace and different spiritual qualities continuously manifest from this activated core and radiate sonically into our physical becoming. Our soul pattern expands its conscious destiny to include dimensions of life beyond the physical plane.
8th Formula of Inner Alchemy
Heaven & Earth Alchemy: Marriage of Form and FormlessThe Congress of Heaven and Earth, or simply Heaven and Earth Alchemy. This practice explores the origins of human love and how it serves to integrate the 3 Treasures/Originals of the Tao. We couple the Early Heaven or formless Self with the Later Heaven (Earth) physical Self. The Self here identifies itself here with two dimensions that co-exist and co-create: the “formless form” of our being and the “substantial form” of our becoming.
These two polar dimensions of our greater Self engage in cosmic sex. They couple in order to re-open the portal to their Original state, or “Pre-Self”. This pre-state or Primordial Heaven is called hundun, the primal chaos-unity or unconditional love state that preceded the “big bang” of the cosmic egg cracking open.
The Three Pure Ones or Three Originals (san yuan) of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity are gathered in the three body cauldrons as original jing, original chi, and original shen. This three-tone harmonic chord is resonated with the fundamental or original tone of time and space. Consciousness then stabilizes in the axial center where our true multi-dimensional nature can now be embodied. A continuum between unconditional love and the myriad forms of conditional love is consciously crystallized.
This practice creates a tonal double vortex spinning faster than the speed of light within the void of space. This opens up fully the Music of the Spheres, the cosmic subtle bodies in harmonic play. Into this symphony is fused our inner sage’s immortal presence, the quintessence of humanity meditating on unconditional love in the center of a cosmic torus (spiritual black hole). We must enter this primordial sound portal to complete our journey of Return to the Origin.
9th Formula of Inner Alchemy
Human Sage Merges with Tao
Union of Human and Tao. This stage is the integration of the eight previous levels of consciousness into the experience of living simultaneously in the present moment in all dimensions, from physical linear time to spirit’s eternal time. This state cannot be fully known or defined conceptually for others. The Taoists simply describe it as the experience of living fully in the wuji, the Cosmic Present Moment. Wuji is sometimes translated as the Supreme Unknown -- which could be equated, in western religious terms, as living from a godhead that has no ruling god.
This is the true achievement of the authentic or Immortal Self, a permanent state of grace and high creativity known as wu wei, “effortless action”, or “spontaneous action without acting”. Creation (of the manifest) and Return to Formless Origin seamlessly complete each other. Attainment of this final level is, in my belief, spontaneous; it is not a technique. It is the natural evolution of humans to realize their divine nature.
It happens naturally only when our spiritual virtue (de) reaches a refined level. We have persevered in humbly completing the challenges of our worldly destiny, and diligently cultivated our highest spiritual virtues given to us as yet-to-be-realized gifts at birth. The inner will of our immortal sage displaces our personality and reaches complete alignment with the Tao, Heaven and Earth and Humanity, and the flow of the Life Force. It is the supreme level of grace, bestowed by direct transmission from the Tao to the mature and receptive adept.
