Sphere in China

In the forbidden palace in Beijing, China, there are two lion statues. One lion is female and one is male. The male lion has its paw over a sphere. (click on picture and then focus in on the sphere to get a good look.)

 There is a design around the sphere which is the Seed of Life pattern.

The Seed of Life pattern is formed in 6 elements. The history of this pattern is very ancient. The meaning is faded and forgotten over the ages.
But what does the sphere under the lion's paw represent? ... It represents the totality of Buddhist law.
What is the totality of Buddhist law? ... The spherical Heart at the center of our being and all that it represents; consciousness, power, dharma, our eternal nature, and much more. The spherical Heart has a structure based on 6 elements.
The spherical meridian flow reflects this sphere of Buddhist law.

The well "regulated" heart in a sphere of light

The 6th element, Seed, represents the coordination and regulation of the other 5 elements. We see this in how the palm coordinates the 5 fingers and in how the endocrine system regulates the body functions. We also see it in the pericardium that surrounds the heart.
Without regulation, life could not have developed. Is there a place in the history of Chinese medicine that talks about regulation? --- Yes.

"When our Hearts are well regulated, our senses are well regulated too.
When our Hearts are at rest, our sense organs are at rest too."
Nei Ye, Chapter 49, Guan Zi

And so it is that the elements cannot self-regulate through mutual destruction/discipline in the Heart, as 5-element theory would see it. Their unification and interaction must be regulated and in that way the 5 senses are well regulated too. When our Hearts are at rest (regulated homeostasis), our 5 senses are at rest too. Homeostatic regulation gives rest to the 5 elements.

The 6th element, Seed, with its meridians SJ/Pc, is the element for regulation and homeostasis. It is only found within living beings.

The passage above continues...

"The Heart thereby contains a Heart.
(That is to say) within the Heart there is another Heart."

The Pericardium (meaning peri = around and cardium = heart) surrounds the Heart and protects it. The pericardium provides a protected space for the Heart in which it can be regulated.
Just as the palm surrounds the roots of the 5 fingers, thus coordinating them, the pericardium surrounds the Heart structure giving a space for coordination.

The Nan Jing says, "The source of the Heart comes out at Pc7."  Pc7 is at the base of the palm, which surrounds the 5 fingers. The source of the Heart is at the base of the protected space shown by the palm.

and then you tie this back into the spherical Heart and the total integration of meridian theory in the spherical meridian flow, and you have unified theory for a living being.

I end with a quote to wrap (surround) it all together...

"The Heart of Heaven and Earth – Where is it stored? Yin and Yang stimulate it to manifest a sphere of light."
Li Daoqin

Point combination: Febrile disease without sweating: Yangming stage

There is a  point combination used for the Yangming stage with fever without sweating. I will analyze the point combination using the spherical flow.

The combination is Shangyang LI1‚ Hegu LI4‚ Yangxi LI5‚ Xiaxi GB43‚ Lidui ST45‚ Laogong P8 and Wangu SI4 (from the Great Compendium).

In the Yangming stage, the Yangming channel closes down, thus concentrating Qi in a heating cycle.
What points would you use to release the heat?
You would use points that unlock the Yangming channel:
St45 is used for heat conditions related to the stomach meridian. This point opens the St-Yangming channel to release heat.

What about Large intestine, the other half of the Yangming channel?
Above you see 3 points from LI that open up LI in order to release the heat in the heating cycle; LI1, LI4 and LI5.

Now on the spherical flow you have the following meridians connected in Sheng sequence.  SI4 > LI points > Pc8 > GB43 > back to SI4. (cyclic connection of points.)

When an objective meridian is to be unlocked, it is common to see point combinations using a point from the preceding meridian, a point from a following meridian and a point from the objective meridian itself (according to the spherical flow).
Thus in this point combination, the goal is to unlock Large Intestine in a strong way, by using SI4 (preceding meridian) and Pc8 (following meridian). When LI is closed down strongly, sweating is stopped.
Such a strong use of points to unlock the LI should lead to sweating to cool down the body.

GB43 is added to balance LI and make feedback loop to SI4.
The points selected from the meridians correspond to releasing heat.

According to the spherical flow, the order of needling would be... St45 > Pc8 > SI4 > LI1 > LI4, LI5 > GB43. (Order of needling is following meridian, preceding meridian, then objective meridian.)

This point combination looks to be a very powerful one for releasing high fevers with no sweating during a Yangming syndrome.

General Dynamics of Spherical meridian flow

The 12 meridians each have a place around the spherical meridian flow (SMF). There are pathways leading between the 12 meridians. Qi, life force, moves along these pathways passing through the expressions of each meridian.

As Qi passes through a meridian, the meridian is activated; it expresses. The spirit of that meridian expresses in the body. The Qi then continues flowing on to activate other meridians.

As Qi progresses through the meridians around the SMF, the body is healthy. Yin & Yang are balanced and coordinated.

6th step of Physical Order - Qi Gong

The next step is Liver meridian (mutable-fire). Blood freely flows through the veins and arteries. The movements in this step are free, expressive, jubilant, optimistic, dancing, leaping, jumping, swinging, energetic...

In step 5, the body moved individual parts. Here many parts are coordinated into larger movements. The body develops freedom of expression.

The movements are energetic, so empower your breathing with deep breaths. and continue until you feel like slowing down. Then relax....

You have completed the first half of the physical body series.

5th step of Physical Order - Qi Gong

We have done the first 4 steps. The first 4 steps form a group. In those steps the body is relaxed, and the spirit fills the body. The 4 steps define that process simply and profoundly.

Now we begin the next four steps which form another group. Let´s start with step 5.

The symbol here is Cardinal-fire, the Heart meridian. This symbol initiates and activates activity. So after step 4 you are relaxed, your body is full of spirit, and spirit is connecting to all the parts of the body.
What happens next?

It is like you wake up and start stretching your body. You move one part of your body at a time and stretch it. (If you have ever seen a solar flare stretch from the surface of the sun, you can use this as an image to guide the movement.) You continue to activate more and more body parts, arms, hands, fingers, legs, knees, feet, toes, shoulders, neck, eyes, tongue, lips, mouth, and so on......It´s kind of like you are doing a "system´s check" to make sure that everything is connected and working.

Breathing.... when you activate a body part, breath out through pursed lips, as forcefully as you do the movement.  If you just stretch your arm gently, gently exhale through pursed lips. This is a fire breath.

You can use this step in weight-lifting too. Let´s say for example that you want to lift a weight with your right arm. Use the first four steps to relax your arm and breath Qi into it. When you feel the Qi ready in your arm, you use that power to lift the weight. As you practice the first 5 steps more and more, of course you will be able to do them more quickly and with more power for any weight-lifting movement, even just bending over and lifting a box.

Also, there is a technique in Hawaiian spirituality for moving the body. It is called twitching. When you feel tension in a body part, or you feel that your spirit is not connected to a part body, you twitch that area with a quick shake. The idea is to bring awareness to the area and quickly shake off the tension. I am not a big fan of the technique, but I mention it because it is related to this step.

I think this explanation is simple enough to get the idea. I´ll wait to see if there are any questions.

Breathing - some comments

When I studied Jin Shin Jyutsu back in the 1980´s, the subject came up about the most essential thing one could do for their health. If you can´t place your hands on your body because of paralysis or something, or you don´t have enough time or you have fallen down a cliff and can´t move.... What could one do to maintain balance...?

The answer was.... breath.... it is the most basic healing.

There are many ways to breath. When you start the physical order of Qi Gong letting the body slump, I recommend that you don´t do a nose and mouth alternating type of breathing. The extra movement of opening and closing the mouth goes against letting the body slump. You may actually want your jaw to slump too.

But there are other ways to breath. I remember when I was working in an adult foster care home. There was a man there, Bill. He was 99 and vital. He would breath heavily all day long. He would do a sort of powerful fire breath, where he would inhale forcefully a lot of air, and then exhale forcefully through constrained lips. He was forcing a lot of oxygen into his lungs. He would sit and breath like this all day long. I always thought that his longevity was due to his breathing. One day his sister died, and he decided to go too. So he laid in his bed and stopped eating, drinking and fire-breathing. He died a little over a week later.

If you want to know how to breath naturally, observe a horse or dog. They are not in their heads about what is the best way to breath, they breath naturally. And watch them in different situations, when they run, when they sleep, when they eat, when they are being bathed or petted, when they are walking, when they are resting. Also pay attention to the vitality of the animal. If the breathing is good, the animal will have more vitality. If the breathing is poor, less vitality.

Why is this Qi Gong order so simple?

You might notice that the Qi Gong order starts out slow with subtle changes. I mean, for the first four steps in the physical order you barely move apart from breathing.

Is this really Qi Gong? ... Yes. You are cultivating your complete Qi in a meditative state..

Each of the 4 orders describes the complete experience of one body. So you see steps that are much more basic than ordinary Qi Gong movements. You start at the most basic aspect of the physical body >>> Inertness. Then you progressively experience the body to its highest expression, as you will see later.

The steps of each order build upon each other. Ultimately to express the highest in the physical body, you need to cultivate the Qi in all the preceding steps. So.... first cultivate the body mass, ... then the breathing, ... then the filling the body with your spirit, ... then the connecting your spirit to the body.  It sounds too simple, but ultimately the spirit you breath into your body in the first four steps performs a high function.

4th step of Physical Order - Qi Gong

The body is still, breathing and being filled with soul energy. That brings us now to the 4th step.

This step is related to the Spleen meridian, mutable-earth. The energy that is filling your inert body now connects to every part of the body. The energy and body through this process become one.

Imagine that you are traveling in your astral body and you come back. There is a moment when the astral body enters the physical body. but that is not all yet. The astral body must now connect back into the physical body. Has your astral body ever come back so quickly that you wake up suddenly, but you can´t move, you feel paralyzed?
This happens because the astral body hasn´t connected completely to the physical body. This process relates to steps 2 and 3 of the physical order of Qi Gong.

What does it feel like to connect the soul body to the physical body? ... The physical body absorbs the soul energy. The physical body ceases to be inert. Muscles absorb the energy and become ready to respond.

Note to acupuncturists: Spleen points are the most common in cases of paralysis. And if you see someone who got paralysis after astral traveling, use Sp5 with GB40.... or simply squeeze the heel of the foot in the moment. That will take care of it.
(Sp5 with GB40 is a traditional point combination for paralysis, but is related to steps 3 and 4 of this Qi Gong order >>>> step 3 is Gall bladder, step 4 is Spleen)

3rd step of Physical Order - Qi Gong

The physical order is shown on page 70 of the book. It is the order that begins with Fixed-Earth.
After the first two steps, the body is relaxed and breathing. The breath is flowing through passageways all around the totally relaxed body.

The 3rd step is Fixed-fire... Gall Bladder meridian. This meridian reflects the light of the soul shining.
This step is simple. As you breath into your relaxed body, let the light of your soul travel with your breath around the body. Fill your body with your soul.
Whether you are standing or laying down, fill your body with light and energy of your soul.
In step 2, the breath moved through the body opening up passageways. Now, in step 3, your soul power flows into those passageways.

Note: Acupuncturists can breath in through the eyes and Gall Bladder 1 and the energy of the soul flow from there around the body following the Gall Bladder meridian.

typo in book - page 45 - drinking water

On page 45, I say that a general rule for drinking water is 0.3 liters per kilogram of weight. The number is actually 0.03 liters per kilogram.

Spherical Universe for tuna

I saw in the paper today a business that has plans to set up a tuna farm in the open ocean in Hawaii. The farm will have 12 cages in the shape of the spherical meridian flow. 20,000 tuna can live in one cage. Each tuna will weigh 100 pounds at harvest.
Why use the spherical shape? It is the most efficient and strongest design  possible.
The tuna will live in a small universe. Some scientists have calculated that the boundaries of the universe look the same as you will see in this video link...(at least enjoy the Hawaiian guitar in the video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76TLGgjQMOc

2nd step in physical order - Qi Gong

The 2nd step is Mutable-Air. This relates to Bladder meridian - brain and nervous system.

In the first step of Fixed-earth, the body slumped into its weight. The body has no movement, it looks lifeless.

In the second step, your breathing begins. The breathing is easy and relaxed. Air enters the body. You watch it go through the nose or mouth and feel it go into the lungs. Then you move with the breath around your body with your awareness of the physical body. You are traveling along the nervous system.

The breath opens up the mass of the body; shows pathways through the mass. Move with your breath around the body from head to toe. Your breathing may even be imperceptible. This is all done in a subdued manner because your body is still slumped into its own mass..

Even as you progress through the order in this series of movements for the physical body, you can always come back to these first two steps in order to reconnect to the body.

Note to acupuncturists: You may want to breath in through the Bladder 1 point and follow the breath through the meridian going from the brain along the spine out to all parts of the body.

1st step - Qi Gong of physical body

I think that most people will see the four orders in the book and not give them much thought. They are missing something really special.

Those 4 orders show a way to develop our lives, physically, emotionally, mentally and consciously. I want to begin to present a bit of this here on the blog.

I will start with the simplest. The physical order which starts with Fixed-Earth / Yang of the element Earth. In this order, there will be a series of Qi gong body movements. You begin at the beginning, proceed through each step until you complete the end. Each time you go through the movements, the capacity of the body develops more.

The key is to build a strong foundation. This means doing the beginning steps over and over again before moving on to other steps. Eventually the whole order is done as one movement.

The first step of the physical order is to become fixed-Earth. You can either lay down or stand up. You have a body. You let your body relax into its own weight. You feel its weight and mass. The more you let the body slump into its mass, the stronger the foundation for the following steps. This first step sets the tone for the whole series of movements.

This first step has no movement but changes do occur.

Gracias a Bo Guerre

The images of the spherical flow in the book were done 5 years ago by a man in Valparaiso, Chile. His name is Bo Guerre. He is a retired Navy man. I was working for the Chilean navy at the time and I was put in contact with him because someone thought he could do the images I needed.

He lives near an old central plaza where people sit around while their children play. You enter the ground floor of a solid cement building and see this old elevator that goes up inside a spiraling staircase. You walk into the elevator and close a metal gate door. The elevator is open and you can see all around you.

He is a simple man with his own interests. The world goes on around him while he sits in his cluttered office, cluttered with books, pictures and papers from over the years. It was hard to find a place to sit. Of course he only spoke spanish.

He used his computer to design boats in 3 dimensions. He was very interested to see if he could draw my images on his computer. I gave him some sketches and left. When I came back a few days later, he said it was actually very hard to position the 12 balls in a soccer ball orientation. The math was a little tricky for him, but he had figured it out.

We proceeded together to produce all the images you see in the book of the spherical matrix. I would explain what I wanted in my broken spanish and he would get confused. but we worked it out with patience and wonder at the results.

He refused to take any money for his work. He did it all from his heart and his desire to create. I deeply respect him...... a big Gracias a Bo Guerre.

I-Ching and Six-element theory

This comment was made:

...... How does this system tie into the hexagram I ching system, if at all? 


First, we need to realize that the hexagram goes back almost 5000 years. It is very old and comes from the days when the sixth element, Seed, existed.

Obviously the six elements and the hexagram are very similar in nature. Hexagram has six lines and each line is Yin or Yang. Just like six elements with a Yin and a Yang meridian.

Now, there is really only one way to view a hexagram according to six-element theory. You have to use trigrams because they have been used since the oldest known records of the I-ching. 
The bottom trigram is the Yin triangle of Essence and the upper trigram is the Yang triangle of Essence. In this way, six-element theory would say that a certain configuration of Yang activity is transforming a certain configuration of Yin substance.

 

In this hexagram, the Yang triangle of Essence is pure Yin. Thus, the lines in the upper trigram correspond to the yin meridians of the Yang Essence, namely of Hand-YIn (Heart, Lung and Pericardium).

These Yin meridians are actually more dynamic than their Yang counterparts (Small Intestine, Large Intestine and San Jiao). If all the lines were solid in the Yang trigram, it would be less dynamic. The Hand-Yang meridians oversee and regulate activity, but the Hand-Yin meridians are more restless, energetic, impulsive and even more prone to panic attacks... (see page 82 of book)

So, even though this Yang Essence trigram is all Yin, it is the most actively dynamic and potentially unstable of all Yang Essence trigrams.

The Mother of five-element theory

A long-time associate (he was the most active member of a discussion group I had), would like to talk a little about the connection between the un-manifested (six elements) and the manifested (five elements).

Let me just give a simple image for you to work with. The six elements is the mother of the five elements.
Get a good image of the cycle of six elements.... now imagine it giving birth from its essence... what comes forth is the five-element cycle..... The mother then cares for the child throughout life.

Refer to the first quote of chapter 8 by Zhang Jiebin on page 35 of book. His reference to "Earth through the Six" refers to a mother. ... It´s like the idea of "Mother Earth"..

You know, I should really add this to the book.

Update:  And I did... I added this to the ebook...

Why no index?

Someone asked.... why isn´t there an index at the end of the book?

The answer is simple. With an ebook, if you want to look up a word, you just do a search for the word. Actually you can search for words that might not even be in the index.

Anyways I tried an index and it was crazy. For a word like Spleen there were a godzillion references.

Important Inspirations from Lonny Jarret

Many years ago. I can´t remember how many. I was a member of Lonny Jarret´s discussion group for Nourishing Destiny. He would challenge my views on six elements. We had long long discussions with long posts. I remember. He and some members of his group didn´t agree but they did discuss it. I have a tremendous respect for Lonny Jarret.

He received a copy of the ebook today and liked it because of its model. He says a model is important.

But there is something else important to him. He told almost 2 years ago that a book should add to the vertical development of Acupuncture. This means deepening the spiritual path. Most writers expand what is already known.

My book has plenty of spiritual depth, in addition to the views of meridian theory that have never been seen anywhere else. To me the spherical theory is clear and true. I have lived with it for many years. But I need to understand that it is new for everyone else.

The title of his book, Nourishing Destiny, I think captures the essence of five-element theory. The title of my book, Creating Life, captures the essence of six-element theory.The titles complement each other.

This book opens doors to a deeper understanding of Chinese medicine. I am not sure if our generation will catch on fast enough to the spherical flow. But the future generations will take it and do wonderful things with it.

So I want to thank Lonny Jarret for always being right there... willing to talk and challenge me.

Ask a question or give an idea

If you have a question or comment unrelated to any of the posts, enter it below... Then I´ll post about it, if it is appropriate of course.

eBook is ready and available

I just got through converting the book from word to pdf. It is now ready. It is an ebook.
The rain is coming down now outside.

eBook is coming

I have finished the book.... FINALLY... . I am now working on getting the book up to this blog site. It will be in PDF format.

Welcome to the Six Elements blog

This blog will talk all about what is happening with Six Element theory and the Spherical Meridian Flow. .Thank you for your interest.