For this month’s regular open-audience, open-discussion “Ask Us Anything” — continuing discussions about meditation and related topics — Denny presents the long standing Five Element system mostly in terms of astrology, Qi and the body — an expansion on his article Qi and the “Real” Organs — with me commenting along the way until the show ends prematurely due to unknown technicalities with live streaming services.
Denny amended the video solo to wrap up. My closing comments are tacked on in the audio only version.
Audio: Qi And Astrology | (8/31/2021 — “Ask Us Anything – LIVE” With Denny K Miu)
Or listen via Insight Timer (app or website)
Topics include:
- Galileo, telescopes, Copernicus, Heliocentrism
- Friends and associates (known and unknown) as well as public and private societies involved in the rise to popularity of certain historical figures
- Differences and similarities with astrology and astronomy and religion’s influences
- History is (re)written by the victors (usually with agenda)
- Western astrology sometimes not in accord with actual positioning of space object
- Chinese 12 deities or 12 zodiac system
- How leap year factors into Denny’s building of a clock chip in experimental physics lab
- Five Elements (/materials/ phases/ liveliness/ movements/ behaviors/ interactions/ etc) of water, metal, fire, wood, earth and their correspondence to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn respectively
- Using this system on the surface with next step maybe being verifying it in one’s own experience and eventually maybe even investigating how this system was discovered, assembled and propagated
- The organs and elements’ relation to emotions
- “Treasure Organs” and “Vessel Organs”
- Various bodily/organ essences
- Role of kidneys in marrow
- The ambiguity in translating Chinese, for example the two relationships between elements translated three ways as 1) nourishes, suppresses 2) supports, opposes 3) generating interaction; overcoming interaction
- Role and influence of teachers and how they teach such as from the book and from experience
- Displaying of physical metals
- Micro (and Macro) Cosmic Orbit; a famous chart displaying this and its possible origins
- 8 immortals
- Synthesis of:
- Taoism (understanding how the Dantian is the treasure)
- Zen (difference of pain and suffering / sensation vs perception)
- Confucianism
- Lü Dongbin
- Dantian
- Bodhidharma
- External and internal Eastern alchemy
- Daoyin
- Energy; and deep meditation as tool to discover and know all this
- How Denny learned Micro Cosmic Orbit
- Relationships and translations of yin and yang and how this applies to the body
- Organs and meridians as understood by function
- Modern Western alchemy as mostly internal alchemy
- Masculine and feminine distinctions as applied to many of these topics and beyond
- Various past AUAs on Qi as well as Bodhidharma and Zen
- Eastern medicine in context of Western medicine and where it may be going
- Various definitions of Qi:
- maybe mystical
- (but mostly:)
- air
- breathing
- rice
- external substances brought into the body
- no fire/lack of fire
- circulation (between kidney/water, heart/fire and lung/metal
- metabolic harmony (between kidney/water, Earth/spleen and liver/wood)
Other questions and points (most left unmentioned in the video version):
- Variations on theories of astrologers. How some correlate and build on each other; how some oppose; and how they evolved and devolved over time
- Why is the air element missing in this element system?
- When pentagram/pentagon diagram arrows reverse so do the interacting relationships between elements
- Do the different time zones and locations on Earth make a significant difference for what optimal time periods correspond with various body, organ/meridian functions? Why or why not and how? Is only one time zone in China relevant to this?
- Fond of Denny’s translation of Triple Focus for what’s usually translated as Triple Burner.
- Perhaps possible similarities in the Distillation, Fermentation, and Calcination stages of the 7 stages of Western alchemy relating to fog (upper burner), foam (middle burner) and gutter (lower burner) respectively
- Noticing the vast benefits for ourselves and others from using this Five Element system and when we may be clinging to it; ignoring/rejecting something that seems to run contrary to it; and/or only categorizing (experiences and phenomena) in terms of the Five Elements as a replacement for not investigating for one’s self
- How does using disorder as in “Metabolic Disorder” and “Lifestyle Disorder” help wake one up to motivate healthy, beneficial changes and how much does it promote unnecessary psychological shame, blame and guilt thus influencing/impacting physiology?
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The raw unedited YouTube transcription of this podcast:
good morning good afternoon good evening it’s another end of the month and at the last tuesday
of the month another episode of the aua um asks us anything so
again it’s the it’s
my co-conspirator josh you’re sitting here on my left and right depending on where you know which platform you’re
looking at good after good morning josh how are you good morning danny yes coke
coke inspire means to breathe together spire respiration right so
breathing in things that we need and breathing out even more benefit or something like that
whatever yeah yeah so it’s been a it’s been a a interesting journey for us do you
remember um when we actually did the first aua yes off the top yeah it’s diff it’s
quite different and uh i apologize uh you know or um maybe it’s of course when i start um moving my mouth there’s
someone outside that’s talking now so maybe you can’t hear them but that’s okay but yeah i didn’t even remember
this and we had a few guests on we were kind of exploring you know i think if i remember right the topic was you know
why do we meditate yeah yeah it was a lot more about meditation and it’s
it’s it’s a live journal actually it just kind of documents where you and i you know uh what kind of air are we
breathing together [Laughter] so um so we had originally scheduled a
different uh content for today and uh samantha then would have been a great
guess and she would have been talking about something that she did about 15 years ago which had to do with
caregiving taking care of mother her mother and the right way to do that but we’ll we’ll still have her we would
still like to have her come back in the next one uh only because um she’s
moving and where she is now uh she really doesn’t have good uh internet connection so i pull out from
from my stack of dusty paper and i came up with this
talk which is something that we did earlier is really based on a question that was asked
during when the class which is uh what does this cheat is energy does this energy have to do with uh real
quote-unquote organs and and i wrote the uh giraffe on that posted on our patreon
channel and i and i promise to follow up with a video so here we are
so the title of today’s talk josh uh if i may start please take it away didn’t he okay hang
on just one second for some reason you’re not showing up hang on
oh there you go all right so we got both of us now okay so so the title of today’s talk and i i like to think of it
as the part one of uh at least a two-part talk
not sure when the second part is going to come but at least um really dialed that drill didn’t talk about exactly
what is qi and so the title of the talk is uh chi and astrology
now that can’t get you clicks [Laughter] so so uh so i’m gonna just go okay josh
please okay so so i’d like to bring us back to um um my favorite uh scientist
uh galileo only because my son uh went to a school a high school in san
francisco named after galileo he’s actually one of the one of the first scientists uh probably
the most famous scientist in modern science and second being isaac newton and galileo was very very
uh at his time and uh and one of the things that he did was he invented a telescope
and he started to observe the stars and so of course he observed
the moon and then the jupiter which was the biggest
planet as you know on in our solar system and he came up with something that um
essentially landed him in house rest house arrest with the church
it was something so controversial that the church actually the catholic church actually went out the way they want him
to not to um continue his study and when he violated his
quote-unquote restraining order they put him on ulceratives and he actually died during that time and so what is it what
is it about what he did that was so controversial it was something called heliocentrism
hideo is the name of the god it’s a sun god so the idea is that
he believed that it is the sun that is the center of the solar system and then
all the planets including earth rotate around them around the sun and of course he he the way he proved that is is by
his observation of uh the tie how the tie is influenced by the
the sun and the moon and the jupiter and there was a theory that was actually put out um probably a hundred years
before his time by another scientist or another thinker anyway interestingly he never published his
work he never published his work and it was finally published on the year that he was he died so he never had to deal with
the church and it became kind of a underground
kind of movement to say hey you know it is the it is the the sun that we all evolve
around and then why is that so hard for the church well because if you go back to the bible you go back to
the old testament uh go back to the uh where it talks about god created the
universe he created the earth first right he parted the water revealed the
earth revealed the water and revealed the air and then the lawn he invented he constructed the sun and the
moon so as far as the church concerned we every the universe
evolves around earth not the other way around so that was that was bad and so he was he was uh he
was put in rest and so now it turns out that today people realize that that kind
of thinking that that idea actually he uh was was uh was quite old
it’s actually um it’s about 200 years before christ and some other scientists had thought about it but it’s no
it’s not any clear what the connections are so those those could be kind of independent of in one another now it
turns out that the chinese understood that the chinese actually understood that um
probably four or five thousand years uh ago i mean before uh gail’s time yes
josh okay so yeah um so before we get dive into that um if you want to back up
one maybe um and speaking of the catholic church um you know of course i live in a neighborhood where there’s a
catholic church and the church bells are going now they they go the top of every hour and noon to six they play
you know more bells so i thought that was fitting maybe to mention um i’m always fascinated by these figures
in scientific history and throughout our history too of um you know what are their associations with other people um
in their kind of the societies both public and private
and unknown about maybe that we don’t know about um and how that influenced
maybe how they came up with these or you know who are their supporters
um and then who benefit from their theories and like danny mentioned who you know who supposedly didn’t benefit
from their theories you know all kinds of things like are people you know what
kind of are they pretending are they acting in certain ways for certain reasons you know there’s just so much
things we don’t hear about that can go deeper with the story but as far as their relevance i don’t know
now i know the the the heliocentral model it’s interesting and then he mentioned the old testament um that
there is the very first thing the division of light and darkness so i think that i don’t know how that plays
in exactly to this but um with the sun bringing light and then in the creation story in the
old testament about you know um creating day and night so um i just
thought those were some uh things to point out so hopefully i didn’t um disrupt the flow too much
yeah i the answer lies in the history development of different societies so
the western culture um had this history of the the dark ages
and then and then um and it has the history of the um um you know in between the dark ages and
the and in the renaissance there was a period of time very long time where the entire um
continent was was under the control of the church and the reason why the church becomes so powerful is that they they
basically validated the emperor you know so so it’s it’s kind of interesting to think
about the helio helio is is the worship of the the the god of the son right
and so um you would first think that that’s that’s contradiction to the worship of god
right so god always supersedes sun because sun was after always is his creation
and and um and yet when it was formalized into um
catholicism at least the roman branch of that they moved the day of celebration from
saturday which is about means the resting day is
the day that that god have already created the universe and he’s taking a day off
and so that was about is uh saturday is really the day of celebration but yet they they decided to move to sunday
because it was it was just you know market positioning it just it had to be the way to really accommodate uh as big
of a customer base as possible and so there’s there’s a lot of a lot of stuff going on and in fact um you know if you
remember the christians the questions were were crucified you know by the romans
right because it was it was it was considered a outlaw religion and it was only you know it was only late on that
they decided that hey you know if you have one god then you can have one emperor that’s not such a bad thing and so it
kind of what and so this is this is how the western society evolved and it so
the church has so much power because the emperor have so much power and the emperor relies on the church to
legitimize his control now the same thing is happening same thing has happened for thousands of years in in
china in the east except that in this case the emperor in the east is the son of the heaven
so he in that case he elevated himself to be the son of heaven he is part of heaven in fact even today in japan
the the the emperor of japan is a direct descendant of the kami kami the god
right and so this whole idea of studying astrology is
is interesting because in the west astrology was not studied until galileo came along which is you know 400 years
ago whereas the study of strategy started 4 000 years maybe even more they
actually have excavated lots of artifact that says that yeah they were studying and the reason they were saying that is
because they were empowered by the emperor who after all is the son of heaven and so
it’s part of his apparatus for controlling the people just to to to actually have a group of quote
scientists astrologists you know to to to support him so i i find that quite interesting i find that
definitely yes and you know i was always fascinated by history but i don’t know how well i get in because like maybe in
the back of my mind it was like okay well we’re only really told the version of history that comes from the people in
power and you know everybody it right now hasn’t stopped
it has not stopped it’s still continuing so you know we do hear a portion of the history but you know it usually comes
from the people who either won wars or who are in power and obviously there’s an agenda behind that because they’re
saying certain things from history in a certain way that helps promote their agenda and
their and their continuation yeah which i mean yeah i mean that that’s it that’s one of
the perks for being in power is that you get to rewrite the history yeah and yeah like you said some of it
is just outright rewritten you know it’s yeah yeah some of it’s more accurate representation correct so so the point
that the point i’m trying to make is is the the strategy the study of the strategy
in the west is it started late and even when it started it was totally suppressed by the those who are
in power whereas the study astrology was encouraged in fact it was it was it was
uh considered uh part of the uh the the apparatus for maintaining control and it
started many many years ago so the idea that that that that the tie
on planet earth is associated with the sun the moon and the jupiter
that’s a four thousand year uh knowledge and the chinese understood that long ago
to look so much that that they understand that it takes 12 years
it takes it takes 12 years for the jupiter to go around the sun
yes i just wanted to make one more brief distinction between astrology and
astronomy right the astronomy is is more like the study of the actual stars in
the heavenly bodies and astrology is more of how they affect our everyday
life our environment and correct correct and things like that so there are very
closely interrelated but there’s a distinction there so i think yeah correct correct so i would i would
that thank you for that josh so i would definitely uh agree with that and i would go as far as saying that galileo
was astronomer astronomer whereas the chinese who study the planets were astrologists
because they weren’t all that interested in um studying the planet as much as this they
wanted to understand the effect of the planets have on the people
and having that knowledge gave them the the the
unfair advantage so to speak of of being able to then say hey you know this is what the stars are saying this is how
we’re going to affect and you know so let you know before one that this is what’s going to happen right i’ll just
make one other brief comment because i uh of western austra
astrology which i have very very little knowledge of i will say one thing that i learned
recently that i i think is a relevant point to make since we’re sidestepping western astrology which is
is definitely good for this um what we’re doing here today the one thing is it doesn’t seem to lie align exactly
with the reality because it’s divided into 12 sections but sometimes the
actual star placement is briefly different from the way it’s classified
in western astrology so when some people say the moon is in i don’t know for example virgo well sometimes it might
actually be in the next sign over in reality if you if you look exactly where the placement is so correct i don’t know
i feel that’s kind of well the universe is geometrical just not mathematical
the two are very close but they’re not exact so i mean i remember one time i was back in the stage when um
i was in graduate school we were just before the show talking about how i entered graduate school and became the lone
experimentalist and so i was building up my lab and i had to actually build a little cart that plugs into
ibm pc back in the days and and i had to build a little clock chip and it turns out
that you can’t you can’t do that mathematically it turns out that you think that every four years the leap
year except that there are you know it’s not every four years forever
anyway um so so that’s right so so the so they decided that they understood that they understood that it takes 12
just by looking observing the jupiter they understood that it takes 12 years for jupiter to return to
its original configurations and and so they actually came up with the 12
deities you know which one represents one configuration one constellation
and then um and then eventually that evolved into the 12 uh zodiac signs so
for example i i i’m a monkey and so i was born in 1956 you know so therefore i’m a monkey now
very quickly they realize that just like you said it it it’s it’s good but not good enough
and they realize then that um it’s not just the jupiter that affects us there
are other planets that affect us they’ll be and jupiter happened to be the big
one it’s not the closest one but it definitely had a huge effect on us but then the one that closer to us are
the mercury the venus the mars and and the saturn you know of course they they can’t see far further than that and so
they they actually understood that that there are there are at least five planets in
addition i mean including the jupiter that has an effect on us and and then
they they actually name them and name them after now this is this is
where uh it’s interesting to to think about the translation so some people call these the five elements and some
people call this the five materials and some people call this the five
phases you know like in in different phase and so let me just explain what those
are so so water metal fire
wood now wood is actually tree so everything it has a life to it okay and
then earth in this case is actually more like dirt right and and it’s not the basic elements like
what you would find in the periodic table and it’s not even the basic element that we talk about from the
buddhist standpoint where you talk about the earth the wind the fire and the water you know those are much more the
basic elements so it’s actually inaccurate to use to translate as five elements especially if you were to look
at the chinese character so this is five and this one actually again a single
character has no meaning it’s just how you conjugate with something else so if you conjure with something that it could
mean action it can mean movement it can mean behavior it can mean
um in fact if you put that together with with this guy then that’s really the true word for a
planet is the is the star that is moving that’s a planet and so just
i wouldn’t recommend that as an official translation but let me just say that
it has life to it it’s it’s a five liveliness it’s just how they interact
with each other how they interact with their world and so so so for example um
water it would be the source of life so let me just keep pounding on the word
life salt water would be the source of life tree is where life
begins and the third is what supports life and then the fire perhaps would be one that
actually regulates life and the metal is another one so so the importance is not
it’s not what how they name the star the important is that that becomes the basis
of a four thousand year old culture which is to explain everything in terms
of these five core elements five materials five phase five
movements five i would call it liver so so it’s very interesting it’s really very interesting
for them to really look at that so josh yeah yeah we were talking about this before the show too about the it’s not
really just a noun it’s a verb right it shows a process um you know the the it
being in an element form with a name as a noun it just kind of gives it a handy
reference to refer to as an object when you’re systematizing this for various
means right so like he was saying in actuality nothing’s really static it’s it’s it’s
like a process there’s forces involved so for instance water it’s it can go it
can solidify it can liquefy and it can be in a vapor state earth can
has various forms of density um more solid than other wood i mean can be
burnt into ash there’s sap in wood there’s liquid elements there’s you know there’s all kinds of
different variations and metal too it’s the same way it can be melted down and solidified and water i mean and
and of course fire has different levels of intensity and absence too i would say
briefly that i’ve even found the theory of um i’ve heard of jupiter
because it’s so humongous and it has big moons that it was once a sun and the
moons were actually planets and it’s kind of maybe lost energy or for whatever reasons has been turned into a
planet and i just found that was an interesting theory yeah you don’t hear about too often yeah well we’ll talk
about um harmony uh towards the end of today’s presentation but i just want to mention harmony because the culture the
eastern culture whether it’s chinese or indian the eastern culture
is really based on harmony and it reflects in the language so the language
is is uh is not as precise as you like because it the ambiguity is the basis
for our existence and so you need to have some room so so one other thing that i wanted to say is that when this
idea of the yin and the yang comes to the west and we we kind of just
think that well that’s black and white you know that’s right or wrong and that’s yeah so so this picture this this
picture with the that that looks like a pentagon with the five uh pole five uh
circles that’s yin and yang it’s it’s really yin and yang is just
it’s not just you versus me and it’s not like if you’re not for us then you’re against us it doesn’t work like that
when we say yin and yang is really the relationship between each one of these
circle so so now this one is translated as generating so so this would be yang you
know and this one is translated as overcoming and now we call that yin and because yang is like the sun and yin
is the absence of the sun i would rather in translate again be as it just kind of
expand our horizon of thinking i would just translate it as supporting
okay it’s just something supportive so for example i i i mean it when i say that josh and i
are the yin and the yang because when we say yang is is is how we support each other
okay and when we say yin is is how we kind of um
bring you know pull each other back okay so so this idea that these five
materials have both the yin and yang so let me explain that so for example water
if you think about water as the source of life then
the wood which is really the tree it’s a live wood okay so everything has a life to it so so the water always supports
the tree supports the wood now the wood supports the fire that that makes sense
now the fire actually supports the dirt supports the earth and the earth support what is called the
metal and ultimately the metal supports the water so you can get very precise
but you know it’s best to leave it as a bigger ambiguous idea is that for example you would say how does the metal
support the water well think about condensation you know think about or a metal as a container you know just leave
it at that and then you would say how does the earth supports the metal well you know the the metal orc the iron ore
comes from the earth you know just leave it at that and so the idea is that there’s these five things that each one
has a supported role to each other the water supports the tree the tree supports the fire the fire supports the
dirt the dirt supports the metal the metal supports the water and so forth at the same time
each one has so this is how how josh and i would just like brainstorm and and and
and and you know one plus one is equal to more than two whereas they also have
this yang relationship the yin relationship which they’re kind of regulating they’re pulling it back so
for example water has a regulating effect of fire that’s obvious
fire has a regulating effect of metal because it can melt metal and metal has a regulating effect to the tree because
i suppose you can bring down the tree but the tree has a
support a regulating effect on earth okay and the earth has a
regulating effect of water so the point that i’m trying to make is that this is
a it’s it’s a i wouldn’t go far saying precise and i
won’t go in without saying ambiguous it’s somewhere in between it has very definite meaning
but don’t take it too far the important part is that this really is the yin and yang
it’s not just black and white it’s really coexistence of all the all the materials on earth and all the or the
ramification of life yeah denny and i would um
very good you know and the other comment i would make about yin and yang perhaps you know mention the obvious
masculine and feminine principles um the complementary and correspondence
effects of it and then also um like polarity too it’s not they’re not separate they’re just kind of one end of
the spectrum and the other possibly so yeah um yeah i think that’s a good idea
i mean this is this is a good way to to to talk about it that that if you say you know masculinity versus similarity
and you you necessarily equate that to male and female that’s too rigid does richard because a a mother can be
both you know can be very nurturing right and can be very uh disciplinary i
mean you and i know that yes and all of us have certain aspects of
yes yes femininity within us yeah you know and now going to you know with denny
said about these i maybe i’ll just fill in the gaps with some examples um how
water um is limited by earth or
you think about the river banks right river banks will hold in water um what was the other one that denny did
not give an example on um help me remember here denny
water um some of the the the water and earth does
this one right here ones you didn’t give examples for either way
uh well no you you do it you do this okay yeah go ahead uh well i i’m trying to
remember if you’ve given examples or not but uh which ones you’ve already given but uh well the for example the fire
melts the the metal i i think i said that fire restricts oh wait it’s uh overcomes yeah so you think about a
blacksmith right you heat up yeah you heat up metal to to to to to do it to bend it into shape yes
now metal and wood denny mentioned uh the the axe and uh and you know another
thing is that if you now i’ve heard of this i can’t verify if you just
will spray micro particles of metal by trees well then when they try to uptake
nutrients from the earth sometimes it gets clogged and then it stops nutrients
from reuptaking in the tree and so the tree could eventually die um yeah
yes let’s see what’s another example um wood restricting earth well that’s what
i just said right that the wood will take nutrients from the earth certain nutrients in the ground
out of the earth for its own benefit um yeah or or you build a barrier
you know when you have when you want to prevent must lie and well that’s right you need to build the barrier i mean
that there’s so many there’s so many examples there’s so many examples that i mean if you want to make it work you can
you can go you know yes exactly you can look for example and you can look i was just might as well just
mention here briefly now you know the system we’re talking about today we can just use it on the surface to apply it
to our everyday lives without very many questionings and uh eventually maybe if you’re interested you can take it a deep
level deeper level and look into it as your own experience and how it verifies in your own experience in your
in your reality of how it um how it actually applies and um you know in actuality yeah and then maybe one step
further that’s probably not really relevant is maybe looking into the origins of how this was system was
actually discovered you know and why they put it this way and how they actually figured this stuff
out right right well i would i would definitely try to answer that and and especially when it has to do with chi
okay definitely that and that’s the whole point of today’s presentation is is really like how did they how did they
discover chi and what is chi and how does the chi lines tied to the organs are they the real organs that was the
question that was the original questions okay so so this this idea of the fine
material is everywhere it’s everywhere in in the in the chinese cultures and i
just listed a few so the five has to do with the organs the five has to do with the emotions the
five has to do with the taste the five has to do with the season so so in the old days the chinese believe that
there are five seasons they actually take the summer and break it into two it’s kind of like the indian summer that
we have in the west coast you know it’s out of the deep summer and so it even break into food and so josh posted a
an article and on on the on our circle on our inside timer circle and gets get
got some response from some of the students about what how do you you know what kind of food how do you eat food
you know that would be consistent with your with your blood type and so the food is is a is a very important but
the color of the food the color in general um the positions you know it’s
just like it just it’s it’s everywhere it’s everywhere it is it’s functional you know it’s how do you decorate the
house how do you build the house where does the window go where does the door go it’s everywhere now of course today
i’m not really here to talk about the five as much as i’m here to help achieve and so i want to focus on
the organs and so for example in this chart it says that kidney and and again i want to
i will keep talking about kidney because the kidney is associated with water and water is
the the source of life and in fact um the the chinese traditional medicines talk a
great deal about the water being the foundation of life everything comes from the kidney everything comes from the kidney the
kidney and then and then now what’s interesting is that the the water supports wood and so liver is considered
wood and so this is where life begins and so the essence that comes from the
kidney is provided to the liver which which is the one that actually uh manufactured
blood okay now then the liver is is being very
constructive to the heart which is considered fire and and so forth and back and then at the same time
the kidney is the one that regulates the heart and the splen
is regulating the kidney okay now i don’t want to get too much into this except that
you notice that there’s only five organs here okay and we know that we have more and
so that’s because the chinese actually separate the organs into two kinds of organs
this one this word right here the the half the other the half of the word on
the right hand side is the same word that we use for tibet so tibet is actually
the treasure in the west that’s what the word means so this is
the word that means treasure and so now we also have the the buddhist
the what we call the earth store buddhist that they john and so that’s the same word and so it’s
always about treasure you know where you where you where you where you store something so the chinese believe that these five organs are the treasure
organs because the chinese believe that that we start with essence so when we
were born we were given some building blocks essence and if we abuse these essence or we
don’t use them properly they’re gone and that would be the end of life and so the kidney is is really the one that has the
essence for marrow okay so the essence comes from the kidney the kidney goes the marrow is
manufactured in the spiral core and they even believe that the brain matter is an extension of
that now this is an interesting point so we when we talk about the
the the two exercise routine that was passed down by buddhi dharma and we’ll talk about buddhi dhamma in a minute but
for those of us so those who have been following joshua you know that we have this practice called the xi jin jin
which means exchanging tendon that’s how it’s translated and there’s another half
and sometimes it’s not clear with your switch but i in a morning practice uh i
i combined the two and i always talk about the other half being the the renewal marrow
so how do you you know so you if you look at the exercise that we do energizing you know energy point doing
stretching you say how does that renew marrow i don’t get it actually merrell means kidney
it’s not the renewable marrow it’s the renewing of your adrenal
that’s interesting okay so so point is that the chinese believe that these five organs and they are the yin
organs okay now i’ll come back to that in a minute what does that mean there there are the treasure organs each
one of them contains essence so so that’s one of the thing is that in
the western culture we we we put a lot of value on sweat you know we think that
we like to sweat a lot that’s good for you right now in the east the opposite the sweat is the essence of the heart
and so sweating is okay but don’t do it too much don’t overdo it because that’s that’s you know if you sweat that’s
that’s all that’s what you got what’s interesting is that the opposite of the terrestrial organs is this word
now again the the left half is the same the right half this one means means uh
mentioned you know i mentioned a big house or it actually means the the place where it’s
like the government building it’s also that way so i translate into something else so these these are my translation i
translate into vessel it’s an empty vessel it’s something that is empty
meant to contain something else okay and so for example bladder contains urine gall bladder small intestines
large intestine obviously contain food at different stages stomach containing food so these are
called the vessel organs and it’s one to one correspondence so
i’ll talk about this in a minute but it’s important to to break it in half so for example as much as kidney is
considered water so is bladder as much as liver is considered wood so it’s gallbladder they come in the pear okay
all right so this this is the question is okay with that with that understanding where does qi come from
where does she come from so well before we go on sure sorry go ahead go ahead
yeah i just wanted to point out that uh it’s interesting that the translations between um
these that you use for the arrows and then i’ve mentioned this previously um how let’s see this one nourishes and
suppresses and go back one slide and then here the translation is
generating and overcoming and the article let’s see it’s used as
inhibiting and um let’s see uh supportive i think is
that right um yeah so these are all great translations and it seems like uh you
know depending on the context which one is more accurate to help our our our understanding and uh um you know in in
relevance too so i i like the the ambiguity that denny was talking about and how it leaves open room for
interpretation um which can be very helpful at times um the other thing
i know there there’s also something else that are even more important than that okay which is
you have to gauge the teacher who’s doing the teaching and so i used this example before where
you know i was a professor for nine years and there’s a there’s a big difference between teaching the undergraduate versus the teaching the
graduate school you know the undergraduate we teach from the book you know everybody gets a book so it’s
exactly the same as mine i’ll teach it from the book and you learn it from the book in fact after a while i don’t even
prepare a class anymore you know i just opened the book you know like an hour before class and and i just i just know
what now when you go to graduate school you don’t teach from the book anymore the book is not written yet has not been
written yet in fact the only guy who is k who’s really uh um uh uh
the guy who’s gonna write the book is you that’s why you’re teaching the material so then you’re not teaching from the book you’re teaching from
experience you’re teaching from what you know and so for example i always use that use
master giroud as an example of someone who teach from his own first person
experience as opposed to a teaching program he never teach from the book every once a while he teaches from the book but only because he’s looking for
something so he would he would he would there’s some idea that he wants to to express and he realized that there is
there’s a book somewhere and so he go to the book and and what you realize is that
his interpretation is completely different from what other people use you know and
the best example of that was was in the counting of breath
you know so we talked about uh the the anapana satay as a counting debra
because you know because that’s how it’s translated and then he was the one said no that’s not how you translate that you
never count because when you can’t use a brick brain and the last thing you want to do is use use your brake brain so you don’t don’t count make it count
i said wow and so what you’ll find then is these interpretations sometimes they’re book
translations and sometimes they’re experience translations that’s right and then the the other fascinating
distinction of you know what are the similarities and differences between teachers teaching
kind of the same material um and a lot of times it just comes down to what resonates with me how is this really
hitting a chord and uh you know helping me understand it more is it
helping me understand it less you know uh so yeah and before we move on to i just want to
maybe be a little silly and well of course somebody’s running a chainsaw out there now so there’s our tree element right and here’s
metal well the periodic element set and i was just going to show um
three types of metal real quick obviously it’s not you know um this is not
literal but this there is association right scandium
and yeah if you’re listening to this this is no good um is that the imaginer look it up on
wikipedia hapnium the metal that we don’t hear about every day
and um yet triumph let’s see when cameron leaves a lot to be desired
but anyway yeah the earth um this earth is a fascinating place okay
all right back on track here so so i have to ask this question are these metal radioactive radioactive
no actually if the ones that because if they are that would explain a lot of things the ones that are missing are in red and
those are the unstable elements some of them you know can only last for like microseconds other ones are radioactive
so yeah but i considered that too okay so so let’s bring that home let’s
bring home the idea of the five materials bring home the idea of the astrology
back to the the the what we are mostly interested which is the chi
and of course we all understand that the chi um is really a taurus concept you know more
than it is a buddhist concept and so one of the things that we practice is the idea of the microcosmic
orbit now this this diagram is actually very famous it would take 10 lifetime to study it
and what’s interesting is that this is actually your spine [Music] this is your spine this is your brain
and then now the don ten is actually uh uh symbolizes the the field
okay so this is the oxen pulling the car this is where you this is the field okay so the don ten is is the field ten
is the field and so this is really where your adrenal is and there’s fire and you
know i mean you as i said you can spend a whole lifetime studying this chart and it has everything you need to practice
microcosmic orbit now there’s some controversy conversely as to where this chart came from you
know and some people say oh it’s four thousand years oh some people say well maybe not so i i’m not going to argue that except
that um i know i know for a fact that um there’s a very famous taoist is actually
considered to be the patreon of dao and and
and they actually did the excavation not too long ago of his hometown and they found some document
that is very similar very very close to this chart so there’s some idea that maybe he was the one that kind of
integrated all the knowledge and put it together and now i didn’t bother to translate the writing
and so the chinese writing here means eight mortal crossing the sea
so he was one of the eight mortals if you if you are familiar with the chinese culture now
when we were talking about practicing in the desire realm
and i remember we talked about the difference between the taoist the buddha the taoist versus the yogi
versus the the buddhist and i remember talking about the yogis are the ones that want to
escape the the desire realm practicing in the
in the uh the form and the formless the rupa and europa whereas the buddhist buddha himself had
was a yogi and he had reached the very upper layer of that and he wants to go beyond
that so he wanted to escape the three realms and that’s that’s his definition of
liberation whereas the towers were really more focused on the the desired realm and just escaping
the human realm to be in the immortal realm if you will that did and so the
the story about the eight immortals crossing the sea to return back to the
human realm is a very very interesting story and out of that one
is it might be more but this one actually started to study
both the taoist and the buddhists and in fact he more than anybody else he was the one that integrate
the three which is the taoist the buddhists and the confucianism and that becomes really the chinese
culture okay and he actually written the poem and i i didn’t want to bring out because i didn’t want to bother to translate
where the last two verses i liked a lot where he’s talking about dao he’s trying to explain what dao
dao and he says if you understand how the dantan is the treasure then you
understand dao that’s really amazing and then at the sa
immediately after that he says if you understand zen and use the word zen
okay and use the word zen if you understand sin it’s now i i’ll paraphrase a bit it’s really about
understanding the difference between pain and suffering the difference between sensation
versus um perception it’s understanding how not to use your
brick brain and use your spiral core i paraphrase but that’s but my point is that at that one
poem he talks about the meaning of tao and the meaning of zen
so what where does this n come from zen come from buddhi dhamma and buddha
dhamma actually predated lou by almost 200 years
and so the thing that i wanted to say is that the chinese the the dao the word dan
this word here dan tran is actually the word for alchemy
thyme means red red means the pill so for many thousands years the towers were
alchemists and so when they were talking about practicing the dow they were actually
manufacturing the dawn manufacturing a pill heavy metal that they can swallow that
would give them longevities and all kinds of things it was it was really budhi dharma we changed that and then it
became internal don versus external dom and the internal dynamic even though
they still carry the word alchemy has nothing to do with alchemy anymore it really has to do with the energy field
within you that you [Music] uh guy and enticed
remember the word dalian is guy and enticed so so once they do that then they start
to really you know they can then go into deep meditation state and they can start
to really understand their body and they understand that the body actually has a rhythm
has a rhythm and josh go ahead sure yeah
briefly um back to the back the other slide and
you know um the the internal alchemy well the the yeah the microcosmic orbit uh is pretty
profound practice and technique and understanding and you know it we still in i don’t think denny’s ever even
mentioned much about the macro cosmic orbit which is even more involved and complex from from what i
gather if i’m getting that right and yeah so i just uh yeah very very
interesting stuff and then the internal alchemy which um from what i hear some kind of like uh popular or pop western
alchemy teachings um today uh it’s it is more internal alchemy they they
from what i can gather if i’m getting this right where you know you’re not trying to change base metals into gold
externally you’re trying to do certain different practices and techniques and
learnings and whatnot to change our internal state
from kind of a lower base reality like you know physical pleasures
and sensuality into higher states of uh mind being and consciousness and energy is
involved the entire way so if you’re getting there yeah correct now the reason why i never even mentioned macro
cosmic orbit is because i was never taught michael cosmic abbott was taught by
master gyro one time when we were in china and only because he was surrounded by
monks who were who were shaolin monks who practiced the microcosmic office so
he was sharing with them and he actually was the one that says that the microcosm orbit is the
meditation of the four elements so it’s not just the taoist who practiced that the buddhist had to
practice that too and then that was it he never thought you know he taught the other one now you
know that’s that’s the way master jeru is and so i remember one time he taught that what is that called the nine states
of abiding your mind something like that and he only taught that one time in english
and he only went into detail the first three steps and he actually said any beyond that i
might as well be a step up a stand-up comedian because you guys would never understood that [Laughter]
that’s right audience is key right so yeah anyway so there’s a reason for that and so i sort of i just want to clarify
why why you know i have not been as comprehensive as as you might imagine
so real briefly to start to be my timings off again to for completion’s sake and
accuracy this actually says uranium on there and i was looking this up so
uh it supposedly hopefully it it’s totally completely depleted so it’s been
okay turn off your lighting that’s right am i starting to glow it might glow in the dark but no that’s
what they say it is um it has to be completely depleted forever yeah so anyway yeah okay all right if you see me
glowing let me know yeah okay so so once they become meditators and they they really go into
they’re able to go into this this you know deep states or meditations they’re able to
live beyond the limitation of the physical body and they start to understand that the body actually has a
clock and so back to the old days when buddha when buddha talks about time back in the
days uh they you know in north indians the the the the
the a day is only four hours six hours each hours would be corresponding to four of our
current date you know so there were six time zones it’s just six and so if you look at this chart there are six
there’s six going from the morning to only from the morning to midnight okay
and what the chinese discover is that out of the six there is actually the yin and the yang
and so for example um and this is this is the one i like is that i i go to sleep uh at 11 o’clock i
try to go to sleep before 11 o’clock because the gallbladder liver pair is active
during that time so this is when you start to detox and start to make new blood
and then the other thing that i do is in addition to going to sleep 11 is that i try to wake up before seven
before seven and because at seven o’clock is the stomach splint pair
that is active and the stomach is a yang line and so that’s when you have the most yang energy and if you lie down
you’re not going to be able to benefit from the the general generating your body generate young energy but
essentially the chinese actually took the old six time zone region and refine it into 12
and then the 12 corresponds to 12 energy lines now before i talk about energy lines if
i were to go back to the idea the yin and the yang and the yang is it means the sun i mean that’s the word that we
use for the sun and the yin is the word that we use for the shadow and so the idea is is the
yang is when you’re influenced by the sun and the yin is when you are
influenced by the absence of the sun okay now if you were to take a body part
in that would be the most influenced by the sun it would have to be the top of your
head and that’s where all the yang energy meet that’s why we call this the hundred meat you know everywhere all the
positive energy me and if you have to pick us a spot in your body that is least influenced by
the sun it would have to be at your crotch it would have to be between your
reproductive organ and opening it about and that’s why there’s an energy point there called the yin meat it’s the
opposite of the yang meat okay and so first of all all of these energies
that comes into six pairs break down into the yin and the yang and all the yang energy goes to the top of the head
and all the yin energy goes to the the bottom of the upper torso
and then eventually they go into the fingers and so since you have six energy lines
it’s a 12 energy line three of six six of them would start at the fingertips these are the extremities
and then six of them will start at the toes again the extremities and there’s yin and yang
and so if you if you kind of go to here there’s it’s actually not not accurate to say there’s 12 there’s actually 12
plus 2. and so let’s just go down to 12 and so you have the
um just look at the the fingers the starts of the fingers are
the the heart and the small intestine the triple warmer and the pericardium
and then the large intestine in the lung now you might again trying to answer the question so are these real organs
well they’re real energy lines that name after organ so let’s just focus on the energy line as opposed to
the organ because unfortunately by the time we translate into english
we’re now comparing a 4 000 euro culture with a 200 euro culture
and so the western concept of these organs are very limiting very precise but very limiting
and then whereas the the definition of these organs in the chinese are much more ambiguous ambiguous and much more
encompassing okay so i will only say if i would again try to answer the question are the
energy line correspond to real organs well what is the definition organ
right so i would just say rather than pointing to a physical component of your body point to
the function and the function could be one or two organs working together because it has
to be all five of them working together and so that’s that’s where the where the energy line comes from
and the most important is that they not discover through um a a a dead body
right the western culture you know takes a cadiver and dissected cardiver and review the
organ cut away the connective tissue
whereas the chinese way of exploring the body they do it through a live body because
they do it through meditation with the connective tissue intact
and so when we talk about qi it has a lot to do with the connective tissue that is really the channel
for both electricities and magnetism and it’s that one single organs that
contains everything that’s why we have these two this energy line here called the triple warmer
the triple warmer is like the the joint chief of staff you know
you can separate the marines from the navy and the navy from the army and army from the air force
but as far as the joint chiefs are concerned is that you all work for me you’re all together here right and so
the triple warmer is quite interesting now again you can translate that as warm warmer
translate that as heater i prefer to transit as focus is that the body is separate into these
three regions what’s above the diaphragm what’s below the
the belly buttons and what’s between the diaphragm and the belly buttons
and again i mentioned this before is that there is a there’s a descriptions on these three regions they say that the
upper burner or the upper focus the upper warmer is like the fog
the fog is water water is the one that actually
irrigates the earth is the one that actually brings life to earth and so this is where the heart and the lung
located they’re they’re responsible for bringing in the essence from external to
a body and distribute it to our bodies that’s why the upper burner is like the fog
the middle burner is like the foam and so when you when you make alcohol when you make beer when you make soy
sauce you get foam because they ferment okay and so this this half here is all
about fermentation it’s not about digestion it’s about fermentation and this is where you extract nutrient
from the food that you consume from the air that you breathe and then finally the lower
burner is like the gutter but again the definition for gutter here is a little deeper it’s not just that
you throw things away but you reclaim the
valuables from the together before you throw it away okay so this is really the
like the kidney and the and and the bladder has a very very important function they’re not just managing the
waste they actually kidney is the one that brings back all the minerals right you know that and so
the the this is how they discovered the chi is through the body through the meditation
and then they divide it into the five element now of course you say well how does six
treasure or how does 12 divided into five because in this case the heart
actually represents two the heart is both the heart and the pericardium the pericardium is
the the western concept of the heart is the all the muscles it’s all the it’s the one that pumps blood
where’s the the heart again josh and i did a talk many many uh uh
months ago where we it’s interesting how the westerner uh uh mentioned that would hear the word mind
it points his brain and whereas the asians when they hear the same word in chinese they point to
the heart right so so the heart the chinese believe that
heart actually represents not just the mechanical part but all the emotional part
and so when beth you talked about how the mind and how you know i remember i
asked the question what’s the difference between the mind the brain in the heart and
she talked about how the mind actually is also located in the heart i find that
fascinating i haven’t had time to really dig into it yet danny there’s so much uh put out here i
love it um plenty of the comments on i don’t know go ahead go ahead josh i don’t even know
most where to start you know i the um the the comment i had about the
masculine and the feminine again about the um the thousand-point meat right and
[Music] that seems to be maybe it’s an unfair stereotype but it seems like the
masculine more in general is kind of has a proclivity and and naturally has a
more cognitive thing or thinking and that can be both good you know
beneficial and um and not beneficial while the the feminine side tends to do more um
uh body wisdom like it comes more it seems more natural um knowing and understanding the body it’s
like if we have to um work on that yeah i mean we can go i
mean for example back in the days when we used to live in the cave you know the male is the one
that sees the sun right because that’s where the danger you know when once you escape once you leave the cave you know then
there’s danger and so only the male get to leave the cave to go hunt and the mother the female you know
they’re they they’re the force um with the absence of sun that’s right so
that’s another way you can think of it yeah that’s right there’s so many different associations that can be yeah
yeah and uh going back to um what we talked about previously is a shameless plug here that denny and i have done um
shows on bodhidharma and zinn and we’ve done a few already on
chi so yeah you can check those out as well and
what was i guess oh now the um the western medicine concept that denny talks about how
western medicine is kind of isolated parts of the body and um and it’s it
focuses on basically a lot of pharmaceuticals to address certain
organs or systems in the body and the thing is though what what’s not usually
studied is to my knowledge is the interactions of multiple medications
and not only that each one is usually studied in isolation
and then the side effects are noticed but then when you start
adding more medications to that it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of studies on okay well how does one side
effect from one drug that might be of a low percentage or a high percentage interact with maybe a side effect
of another one that could possibly either cancel it out or could make it worse or actually start a even new side
effect because of the combination of these two drugs so now this is where i think maybe their
solution is going more towards collecting a ton of data right massive data collection we hear about
data mining and uh you know big data right and so maybe they’re thinking about running this through ais to
analyze all this stuff which then off um brings up more things of like well how
valuable every time we give out information or health records you know how valuable is that
granted it could potentially help a lot of people um but you know well
how much should money and profit be involved in this and at what expense so it opens up a huge door of a lot of
questions um that i don’t really you know you know how to respond to at this point it’s
just interesting to notice how that seems to be kind of where western medicine is going it may be more towards
personalized where we take it back to this eastern system that it is more of a
holistic with with the w like denny talks about that it’s it includes the entire body uh not only just substances
but you know different techniques like acupuncture acupressure
it brings into effect time of days like denny was saying and
contexts and conditions and causes and astrological alignments and synergies
and do and just on and on and on and on it’s very um in-depth and complex not that western
medicine isn’t but it just seems to include more and consider more things as well um well
everyone we have a little bit of technical difficulty technical difficulty and um so i have to record
this last two slides on my own without josh in any case um
so we we talked about the um um
the the way that the chi came about is really through the meditation understanding
the body understanding the energy field and then also start to associate the energy
field the yin and the end with the five materials or the five elements
and now it’s really want to just kind of close this presentation by saying
what exactly is chi um i think there is a
sort of understanding that maybe chi is this you know mystical force this jedi
false force which could it could be which you could be but actually the word chi
just means air so it can mean some something as simple as breathing
[Music] or i could mean circulation so it’s actually very reviewing to look at the way that the
word the chinese word chi is written so it’s written in two forms so and over
here this is the more modern form it’s in two part the middle is
rise the outside is air and so in this case t just means the consumption of
from from the from the external world both to oxygen and
food and the nutrient whereas the older uh method of writing
the same word qi uh also is in two part the one on top means no none
and then the bottom which with the three or the four points means fire so it actually means two no fire
and so g is something very simple it’s just it’s just uh and on one hand i mean it
means circulation circulations is is really coming back to the kidney the kidney is a water element
that’s a source of of life and the key is working with the heart
and the lung together in this symbiotic triangle and that’s your circulation your
circulation of oxygens in your bloodstream the circulations of your nutrient
and if you have bad circulation you have bad cheat now the other way is
really another symbiotic triangle again going back to kidney
and this time is between the kidney and the liver and the splint and this now is more about your metabolic
harmony right and how once you consume the food you you store
it in your kidney and then now the kidney works with the liver and when you have metabolic disorder most the time is
because you have too much stress in your body it creates stress hormones cortisol it goes into the bloodstream goes in the
liver and then it affects everything else so so when we talk about qi at the
very basic form it’s really just about circulation and your metabolic health
so that’s that’s really the end of today’s presentation is where does she come from what is chi
what was the history of the discovery of chi and that sets up for the perhaps
sometime in the future another talk because what does it mean to have lack of chi or
blockage it’s g it’s really about harmony it’s about harmony living with the universe and it’s about how
many living with yourself all the different elements have to work together like a symphony they’re not just a
collection of mechanical parts you don’t fix them one at a time but you want to make sure that they all work together
and of course today we talk about how what happens when they don’t work together and so we use the word
metabolic disorder metabolic symptom i i want to simplify and say metabolic disorder is just lifestyle disorder
it’s when you eat the wrong kind of food eat the wrong quantity of food is the wrong quality of food eating too much of
it or eating not eating food at all many times we’re just basically eating packaged calories
eating too too often not have not not fasting uh not not
water water has a way of really destroying uh helping with your kidney we don’t drink
enough water anymore we drink all kinds of drinks coffee tea i drink coffee i drink tea i drink wine i do all kinds of
things i hardly ever drink water that’s that’s not good we don’t rest enough
or the quality of a rest is very poor we don’t exercise enough or when we do
exercise we we actually prolong the fight or flight which puts even more stress on the kidney
okay we don’t meditate we hardly ever teach your body to go into the rest and
digest anymore so in any case um that’s that’s sort of a setup for the future uh fortunately uh unfortunately
we had a technical breakdown uh really um as a platform that we use fortunately we
are down to the last slide so again i want to thank uh josh uh for being uh
part of the conspiracy talking about today’s qi and astrology
making all the good comments giving me both the yang energy
which is the encouraging energy and the yin energy which is the regulating energy okay with
that i beat you goodbye see you next month again the last tuesday of the the month
and hopefully this time we’ll manage to get samantha damn be a guest again bye
Integrating Presence 
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