gain experience of it in a safe, systematic, verifiable, and useful
fashion. Chinese pragmatism worked its way into Chinese meta-
physics. One did not raise up one’s consciousness toward Heaven
without rooting it equally deep in the Earth. This need for “ground-
ing” defined the development of Taoist yoga. Tai Chi Chuan is noth-
ing more than a walking yoga with self-defense and healing appli-
cations. Unlike Indian yoga, one’s feet never leave the ground, in-
creasing one’s “rootedness” in the earth energy and safeguarding
against excessive kundalini energy in the head.
It is this excessive energy in the head that often leads to illu-
sions of spiritual advancement, also known as spiritual egotism. It
is not unlike an intellectual who spends all his energy arriving at
conceptual solutions to the world’s problems, but ignores the mes-
sages from his own body about its poor health or finances. In a
similar vein, Wilhelm Reich once complained that yogis would of-
ten drive energies into their head chakras without removing the
“body armor”, or tension, plated about the lower body. He argued
their heads would pulsate with higher energy, giving the illusion of
cosmic serenity, but progress to full circulation of the cosmic en-
ergy would remain blocked.
The Esoteric Taoist system guards against this danger by be-
ginning with the very lowest chakra energy, the survival needs, and
constantly reintegrating it with the higher energies that are devel-
oped. The Microcosmic Orbit is a perfect example, as it circulates
past all seven chakras in the body. Likewise, the Taoists don’t ad-
vocate sudden abandonment of all one’s ego. Depending on the
individual, a secure job and loving family may supply the best
grounding for spiritual growth.
The Taoists advocate moderation, not asceticism. They teach
that if a desire is destructive, it will drop away naturally as the body’s
chi flow comes into balance. The goal is to bring the body, mind,
and spirit into harmony with the world, not to escape from it. Tradi-
tion has it many Tao masters would spend decades moving among
the common people. Only after teaching them how to balance their
anger with love, how to live more harmoniously, would they disap-
pear up into the mountains to work on a very high level of medita-
tion that required deep absorption in nature.
This harmonizing of the forces that fuse man, society, and na-
ture together is evident in Chinese classics such as the I Ching.
Written by esoteric Taoist masters, it simply expresses in poeticChapter XIV