Another question is the relation between reincarnation and immortality.

Taoists view the death process very differently from other paths who believe in reincarnation. From my understanding about Taoism it is not true that everyone reincarnates. If you have not cultivated some essence there isn't any essence there to reincarnate. That instead you are rather more or less recycled back into Tao, or undifferentiated consciousness.

This gets into the whole question of what constitutes a human being. It's one of the most difficult things to understand. The ancient texts speak of the endless flow of qi between heaven and Earth, but I’ve never seen any reference to reincarnation of the same physical human being. To comprehend the Taoist viewpoint, you must accept the presence of multiple internal body spirits, sometimes called the "inner gods of the vital organs."

The most popular version describes three hun or heavenly souls said to reside in the liver, the seven po or earthly souls that reside in the lungs, the shen in the heart, the zhi or spirit of will in the kidneys/jing, and the mind intent or yi that manifests through the spleen. These are the five main kinds of internal soul groups that the texts identify. They often give conflicting descriptions. This is where you need the alchemical formulas to grasp the best way to manage them. I’ve spent a lot of time developing a relationship with who they are, which means who I am and how they function in me, or rather as me.

That's also a very different viewpoint. Most people think of a singular soul rather than a collection of souls.

Yes, it’s a bit odd to think of yourself as being run by a committee. It took me a while to accept this idea but I now see that it is the ordinary human process. In any given moment you are hearing one of these souls expressing its thoughts or feelings in a voice that you call yourself. If you listen closely, you’ll begin to distinguish between one voice that wants to do this and another voice that wants to do that. They may argue with each other. If you have only one soul, per the standard Christian view, how can you have two voices?

Or three or four or five.

Yes. I think one of the main tasks of internal alchemy is to organize or manage our soul team. This is a collection of earth spirits and heaven spirits living under a common human roof. Their job is to get together. They have different agendas, different desires and different wills even. To align them all and to function together into the present moment is the task. This ultimately means we must not only integrate them locally within our person, but also connect them back with the larger Heaven and Earth spirits that birthed them.

Many qigong practitioners learn to manipulate their own or other people’s qi, especially martial artists who are focused on defending themselves or healers focused on changing someone else’s field. Certainly, this skill in controlling qi is necessary at the beginning and intermediate levels. You slowly begin to absorb the principle that your manipulations of qi must flow in accord with some higher principles of the Tao. If you get too controlling, the qi flow is limited by your ego. This is where teachings of virtue arise.

This raises the question of just who is managing your qi? If you think it is your ego, just what is the ego? If you’re not aware of your multiple personal shen, you may think you're cultivating your qi but it may be only a small group of your internal spirits that you are empowering to control the other spirits. So your qi may feel strong, you may be able to whip your opponent’s butt or pump up a patient’s kidney, but you will not feel whole or peaceful. The unhappy voices are from the shen that are being suppressed. Eventually your qi practice will tire you because of this unconscious resistance. You will feel stuck, even if your level of qi cultivation appears much higher than that of ordinary people.

Until you find a way to integrate the shen.

Yes. The high level method of internal alchemy is to train your internal spirits to manage the balance of yin and yang qi. When the yin and yang internal spirits are integrated, the yuan shen, or original spirit, begins to live inside you. This is the sprouting of the immortal embryo.

You talk about the group of souls or committee. Do you think that there is such a thing as an oversoul that oversees them all?

Yes, this is ultimately the function of the local shen which resides in the heart/brain. But your personal heart shen is not really an oversoul until it merges with the heart of the Big Shen, the greater or cosmic self. The alchemical formulas guide you to that stage gradually. The personal heart shen controls the flow of qi to the other body spirits, just as the physical heart controls the flow of blood to the vital organs. It is shaped by your astrology, your karma, your elemental makeup. It's what gives you your personal pattern, your personality.

What happens to that at death?

My understanding is that all of these spirits, whether it's the hun, the po, the jing shen, the heart shen or the yi, are all immortal; none of them actually die. That’s why they are referred to as your "inner gods." They'll just split off from the body at death and go on their separate ways unless they’ve fused into a greater identity. So, they don't die. The personality dies because there's nobody there to hold it together.

The po souls will go back to the earth where they will live in the low astral planes of the earth until they "sign a new contract" and co-mingle with some new combination of spirits coming together to form a human. I believe this is why the Taoists do not focus on past lives or reincarnation, because it doesn't make sense to try and track an individual through all of this. You're drawing from a whole pool of po souls and a whole pool of hun souls from different shens. All that counts is the harmonious merger of these shen in the present moment. This is the rebirth of their original shen and the original qi within physical time/space. This union of spirits from heaven and earth within a human seems to be in deep alignment with the Tao.

So these people who have memories of past lives—they may be remembering someone else’s life.

When you come into earth time you get a new batch of po souls that goes with the new body. So you're getting their memories, their ancestral memories.

So people shouldn't take it too personally when they have memories of past lives, or think of it as being me, Solala, having a past life in China or whatever.

Not only is it not you, Solala, it may just be a fragment of some being that was there and has now joined this team which is now called Solala. Of course time itself is an illusion; past and future are just different dimensions of the present. They are all happening simultaneously, so from the point of view of the cosmic self, your Great Spirit ("da shen"), there are no past lives. There are only other lives happening simultaneously.

To experience yourself as this vast multi-dimensional being, you need to integrate your personal internal spirits into one, and that will naturally and easily reopen communication with your parent, the Great Shen. Your Great Spirit is experiencing and witnessing all the lives simultaneously, as opposed to the personal Heart Shen which is limited to experiencing our local lives or local reality.

If we're all immortal already why go through the great amount of work it takes to complete this process?

But it's not you that's immortal, it's your inner souls. At death your soul parts all disintegrate and you may not be there any more. It creates confusion in the universe if you fail to integrate. So basically that's why the shen is bothering to incarnate in the first place, because it's trying to recover its missing fragments. That's why we come in feeling incomplete. It’s why we're hungry—sexually, emotionally, all kinds of ways. We're trying to find and gather the rest of us and integrate in with the other parts of the shen that have been fragmented and scattered here from previous incarnations.

You could say human incarnation is a process invented by Great Spirit as a means of recovering and reintegrating the lesser spirits that are still hanging out as matter, as jing shen. Matter itself is nothing other than spirit that has not yet come home or is refusing to reintegrate with the formless aspect of spirit. In the West this is seen as the battle between the forces of Darkness and Light. The Tao, however, does not favor yang over yin, it embraces both and thus reveals its original non-dual nature.

Taoist alchemy is one way of speeding up the flow between jing, qi and shen by accelerating the balanced flow between yin and yang qi at each of those levels. The yuan qi emerges from the wu ji, which has no polarity. But you can’t jump straight into wu ji; you’ll lack the wisdom and presence to remain. Your lesser or personal shen will pull you back if they don’t feel complete. So you start on the personal or body level, then gradually begin working up to the planetary and then stellar levels of yin-yang-yuan interplay until you feel complete on all levels.

There is a popular illusion, promoted by Hindu transcendentalism, that all matter is maya and is going back into spirit. This would end the process of creation. This spiritual notion has led to male dominant, nature exploiting, anti-female cultures. I think that physicality may have started as an exploration by spirit, but is now a stable state. The Tao is not just going to wave a wand and end all the suffering and problems of physicality.

Why? Because spirit loves matter. Shen loves jing. They are addicted to each other. This entire physical universe may be the place where spirit junkies go to get their physical fix. Even if you "transcend" or dissolve your personal jing back into the wu ji, there will be other shen lined up around the block to take your place, waiting to have the thrill of physicality.

Yet I believe something new is evolving, which is a hybrid of spirit and matter, in which a less dense physical body or a light body would be standard. The Taoist quest for physical immortality is holding open the doorway to the practical realization of that new body. I think that this immortal body that is evolving is not just going back to the origin, back to the womb of wu ji which birthed our shen.

The Tao will manifest the desire of the spirit that's in matter to continue having form on Earth, but to be in a form that is in closer communication with the formless spirit of Heaven. In Taoist terms, the ceaseless lovemaking between the Later Heaven realm and Early Heaven realm is birthing a whole new realm or heaven. This information originally came to me in meditation, but I later heard the idea was also extant in China. The term used for this new heaven was Song Tien. It adds an exciting dimension to daily meditation and my teaching inner alchemy.

But the process is not one of transcending matter. It's really one of infusing mater with spirit and integrating it. Matter means body, on a personal level. I thing we've all come here to have a body and I think the Taoists have a wonderful attitude of cultivating not only your spirit but your body. That's why I am a Taoist, because to me that feels most balanced and certainly the most fun.

As you know, a lot of people come to Taoism or to Taoist practices because of health concerns or energy concerns. Then, hopefully they go on to other levels, but not always.

People come to Healing Tao workshops or our summer retreats in Big Indian, New York for two main reasons: One, they want to heal themselves and get recharged. Two, they're interested in exploring their sexuality in relationship to spirituality. And of course once they get into it deeply they find out it's not really about sex or about getting qi. It's really about cultivating your whole being. But the sexual energy and emotional energy are the two biggest sources of confusion for people. So if you can integrate those energies and the spirits that are creating that confusion, that are having those conflicted sexual and emotional desires, then your life gets much easier.

One of the books I wrote fifteen years ago, Taoist Secrets of Love: Cultivating Male Sexual Energy, doesn't really get into the refinement aspect of sexual energy. It's merely trying to stop people from depleting themselves with unconscious sex habits.

I teach the higher level of sexual alchemy as part of the Kan and Li or Lesser Water and Fire practice. This method shows you how to get the yin and yang energies in your body to make love. That's really about finding the yin and yang spirits of the body and getting them to have what we call self intercourse. That is what produces original qi. The polarities of the yin and yang within you come together and this produces the yuan qi. By "produces" I mean it just grows more of it to be available for us personally.

It is very important to clarify this because it's very confusing in a lot of the texts. People study yin-yang and five elements theory of qi but there's not a lot taught about yuan qi. I think it's much more useful to think of there being three forces, not just two forces. The yuan qi is an active and present third force at any moment. This third dimension physical reality is mostly polarized into yin and yang energy. The goal of the alchemist is to gradually increase over time the proportion of yuan qi which remains stable and present here in this dimension. That's what allows the original shen to infuse itself into physicality. The yuan qi or original qi is sort of like a super conductor, a highway or pathway that one can travel on comfortably and is a stable home here on earth.

You mentioned earlier that part of your work has been to present internal alchemy in a way that works for Westerners, without a lot of the ritual and religious trappings from China.

Yes, I’ve been taking the essence of the ancient Taoists into the twenty-first century. The seven alchemical formulas are already stripped down to core practices. I don't think you need to invoke, as does the Mao Shan sect, the "lu" or name registers of hundreds of deities, or use special mantras and talismans to command them. You can learn that; it’s a lineage method. Michael Saso, the Jesuit priest who converted and became a Taoist priest, learned it and told me it works powerfully. But he told me there are only a handful of people left who know it. It is complicated for Westerners; you probably need to learn Chinese. I personally decided my time was better spent practicing nei gong than learning spoken Chinese.

My alchemical tradition works with the polarities of qi in nature and with the natural shen, which manage the natural flow of qi. You can directly tap the energy of the sun, the moon and the stars, volcanoes, water, wind and rain. All of these are natural forces and they are all represented microcosmically within your body. You can resonate those outer forces into your body and do all this work right inside your body without invoking any particular deities other than the natural shen, the spirits that are living inside you and which are connected to the natural spirits that run the body of this universe. Spirits don’t occupy any physical space. That’s why it is possible to unite an entire universe of spirits "inside" the microcosm of your body.

I have no problem with people having connections to religious deities or special guides or anything. Those often appear and people maintain whatever alliances they want to. The principle is what counts, and the efficacy of one’s method. How do you work the different levels of polarity—of water and fire, yin and yang? How do you grasp the essence and open the mysterious gate, the "hidden period" or timeless state, and enter into it?

This is basically what the formulas are teaching. What is the process of reducing the five elements to three forces, of combining water and fire, of birthing and growing the original essence? The metaphor is that of an inner child or golden embryo. But that is essentially just a new consciousness that has a certain substance, that needs to be guarded and protected until it's strong enough to have a life of its own.

It’s good for Westerners to investigate and be able to see that these internal processes have been objectified in some sense by thousands of years of study. The shen is the subjective quality of the experience. You can look at qi as the language shen uses to communicate objectively with. Qi sensitivity is a process of learning to speak a universal language that allows you to communicate with trees and animals and plants and planets.

What then would you recommend for people who wish to embark on a serious alchemical path?

Well there are a lot of people who have been studying the microcosmic orbit now. They have gotten the basics down. But you don't just sit there and circulate energy around in a circle and think that you're enlightened. Opening the microcosmic orbit is really kindergarten! It's laying down some pathways so that you can begin the deeper cultivation of moving into the chong mo, the thrusting or core channels.

So for people who have never done anything, that's a good place to start.

Yes. The next stage is the Fusion of the Five Elements. I think they should also learn the Healing Sounds, to clear the emotional imbalances. One of my favorite meditations is one of the simplest ones, the Inner Smile. That will really link your spirit to the energy channels of the body and to the physical body. You can do that twenty-four hours a day if you include Taoist dream practice.

In the Fusion of the Five Elements you learn how to absorb energy in and start to fuse it into a pearl and open up all the eight extraordinary channels. The microcosmic orbit is just opening up two of them.

This is all part of integrating your committee?

This is creating pathways in which they can operate, so you can communicate with them. In this way you begin to develop a relationship with your personal shen. Then, after you've learned the Fusion of the Five Elements and you learn how to gather these energies together, you can get them to reverse the process of creation. This is really the key to internal alchemy. It's not just about how to get the qi flowing, but how to actually reverse it back on the pathway from which it came. That begins dissolving the density of the physical body on a very deep level.

A lot of people might do meditations where they visualize dissolving but the Taoist practice kind of works from the inside out. You take the yin and yang energies to the very deepest levels of the core channel and begin neutralizing them, which emits a kind of yuan qi. This original qi has a dissolving effect and is, in effect, creating more space between the molecules of your body, more emptiness.

Would you agree this kind of work can take a long time and requires a high level of commitment, but that there are many rewards all along the way?

This path is its own reward. I consider it a great adventure. I've had hundreds, perhaps thousands of wonderful experiences that I once would have rushed to write in my journal. Now these qi effects and shen communications are my ordinary process.

For example, last year I was at the height of a six hour all night sitting meditation. I felt myself crossing the boundary into a new and very deep dimension of myself. At that exact moment, all the wood in the house started cracking and popping. I was in too deep, so my body could not move to investigate. Later my wife found cracks in all the wooden statues in the house, and cracks in the wood stairs. This amazed me. I took it as a message from the wood element, confirming that my expansion into a deeper level of early heaven was being mirrored here in later heaven.

Alchemy has given me a very rich inner life at the same time I'm leading a rich outer life. I love all forms of meditation, and explored many different methods, but for me none of them engage the multiple levels of reality as deeply as Taoist inner alchemy. There's a doubly rich interplay between the qi flow and play of shen in my inner life and my outer life.

One of the main virtues of practicing alchemy I have observed in my students is their greater serenity and centeredness. They don't feel as controlled by the outer environment. When you cultivate your inner child, your inner consciousness, you're able to experience and witness disturbing things without being pushed as easily into a reactive state. Your personal shen are generally more happy, and it shows up as a kind of personal glow.

Many practitioners become far more telepathic, and much healthier. They heal much more quickly from injury and get ill less often. Paradoxically, one feels more human, more aware of the precarious hold spirit has on its physical body. Because you are constantly changing jing to qi to shen and back again, you never feel limited to a physical body. You never feel stuck in any one state.

Your physical body may feel like it is literally swimming in a great sea of qi. As alchemical practice makes you more sensitive, you become aware that all qi flow is shaped by an infinite field of collective intelligence the ancients called shen. It takes practice to remember continuously that this field of collective shen is who you really are.

Taoist alchemy is one of the oldest forms of deep ecology. It's a practical way to honor the presence of all the intelligences within heaven and earth, and unite them with the beings that live in our own human form. When these three treasures are harmonized, when awareness is fused into a simple pearl essence, a feeling arises that is both serene and joyous. The three dan tiens fuse into a single elixir field. In that moment, the outer universe becomes the inside of your body. See Michael Winn's Healing Tao website.