A beautiful Eastern School Neidan saying
Lu Xixing, founder of the Eastern School of Neidan, one of the secular branches not directly associated with the Long Men religion said this in his annotation of Lu Dongbin’s famous ancestor stele:
“People’s one heart is not dual at its root, but because we become lost in thought we split true and false.”
Neidan practice is an art of cultivating life energy (ming) through the use of nature (xing) and refining nature (xing) through the development of life energy (ming).
Xing and Ming have different meanings at different stages of practice and if we want to begin at the start and really cultivate the golden elixir so we stand a chance of later becoming enlightened and maybe something more, we must start by quieting the mind and forgetting ourselves. This is the foundational basis of using Xing to revert to the life root (what is called the “ming base,” similar to the base of a fruit where the stem inserts). To do this we must understand the formula of “forget to speak, protect,” an essential piece of information contained in Lu Dongbin’s hundred words (the foundational Neidan document). Every school of Neidan comes from this one document and all of them return to it. There is no Neidan without Ancestor Lu and incidentally my wonderful (verging on magical) friend Annie Pecheva told me that yesterday was Lu Dongbin’s birthday, so this seems like as good a time as any to talk about his deepest and most important ideas.
The secret doctrine of forgetting to speak is to break duality and enter the oneness of the pre-heaven so we can borrow directly from the one Qi of the Dao.
This is not the same as just closing the mouth and sitting quietly, it has a method, a small but important secret which is found in the way our spirits and breath merge. Beyond this secret is where the basic methods of each Neidan school differ, but the core secret is always the same, so in the end all schools revert to one.
People are disturbed because they are of two minds about things, but if we learn from the Dao De Jing and daily reduce and reduce again, we may find the real path to achieving non-duality and that it is very easy to practice, but hard to maintain.
Keep going in your meditation and don’t give up,
I wish you one day to fly away on a cloud and freely wander in the azure sky :)