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Do you want to learn how to do Taoism?
Or What is the Tao and What does a Taoist do?

Dear Friend and Seeker of Spiritual Truth,

The Tao and Taoism are fascinating topics aren't they?  You've read some of the Taoist texts, the Tao Te Ching perhaps, or some of Chuan Tzu's works.  Perhaps, you've read about it in a text book.  It was enough to arouse your curiousity, but left you with a lot of questions.  "What does a Taoist do?"  "Why would you want to be a Taoist?"  "Why does it seem so complicated?"  "It seems like no one that talks about Taoism outside of the old books has had any of the Taoist experience.  Why is that?"  "I want to know how to become a Taoist, because I feel a connection, but I don't know how to get there."

These are all good questions.  Taoism was not intended to be so abstract that it couldn't be done by a human.  It also wasn't intended to mean whatever people felt like it should mean when they read a book about Taoism. 

There is a real and useable system of spiritual practice in there somewhere.  If you suspect that there is much more to Taoism than is in the Tao Te Ching, you're absolutely right!  Your spiritual journey has exposed Taoism at its weakest state, perhaps in all of its many thousands of years history.  For that reason, there is very little good information about Taoism, how to be a Taoist, and what the advantages of Taoism are.

Taoism is intended to do 2 things:

1. Dramatically improve the quality of your day to day, nitty-gritty life.  It does not promote a delusional state, where you have to walk around with rose-colored glasses to enjoy the world, and it doesn't basically say that you will have a reward in the great beyond.  It says live here now, as best as you can.  Taoism provides you with simple, straightforward things to actually do that will make your life happier, calmer, and more successful.
2. Provide you with a doable path to achieving enlightenment.  If you are a spiritual seeker, Taoism provides your best probability of success at becoming enlightened.  Taoist training starts from understanding the nature of enlightenment in straight forward, easy to understand terms and moves to the actual practices for cultivating enlightenment.

If you are interested in either of these goals, join the FREE Taoist studies newsletter, and enjoy the large quantity of Free information you'll find immediately after this letter.  There is enough information below to start you fully on the journey to enlightenment and help you to further explore the mysteries of the Tao!

Best regards,

Master Mikel Steenrod

Keeper of the Gate of Man and Heaven

(Lineage Holder of the 4 Ascendant Spheres Purity Adept School of the Tao)

P.S.  If you want to spiritually advance, or are even spiritually curious, you want to get involved in the conversation about Taoism with people that are actually studying, practicing, and doing Taoism. 

P.P.S.  If you find out the newsletter is not for you, simply unsubscribe, and you'll be promptly and courteously removed from the list. 

P.P.P.S. Your personal information is not ever sold or rented.

Question and Answer Discussion of Taoism

• You've read the Tao Te Ching and feel a special connection to it and the Tao.  Many people do.  There are many others that have the same experience.  I have provided a separate web page to talk to you about that connection here.  Tao Te Ching and My Connection.
  
• What is the Tao itself?  The Tao is the underlying fabric of reality.  It composes all things, what we currently call matter, energy, time, awareness and even the lack of those things.  From it, all things are constructed.  The thing to keep in mind is that the Tao is not like building blocks from which things are made.  Tao is aware and all things at once.
  
• What is Your relationship to the Tao?  You are the Tao, a small piece of it.  By coming to understand that relationship, you will ultimately come to understand your connection to the universe and all other things.  You will also improve the way you live your day to day life and the relationships you have with other people.
  
• There seems to be a great deal of Mystical Power associated with Taoist practice.  Is that true?  Yes, it is.  When a human achieves full, deep relationship with the universe, he or she is able to directly interact with the Tao.  To outsiders, this appears as a remarkable state.  It is, however, the normal state of existence for humans.  Humans simply live in a weakened state known as the Social Mind.  This state is considered a self-imposed slavery by enlightenment practitioners.
  
• How do I become a Taoist?  If you are studying the principles of the Tao, exploring the nature of the Tao, or applying Taoist principles to your day to day life, then you can call yourself a Taoist.  If you want to take full advantage of Taoism and have the power of Taoism in your life, you will need to find a teacher.  If you want to associate with the ancient Taoist line known as the 4 Ascendant Spheres, then click here to read about entering into direct Taoist instruction.
  
• How is Taoism Taught?  Taoism is mostly an oral tradition, combined with physical day to day living practices and some reading.  Taoism requires a teacher to be learned properly.  Teaching is known as transmission and has 3 typical forms, which are actually 3 different teaching relationships.

a.       Hermit tradition:  This is the original Taoist teaching tradition.  Taoism has its roots in shamanistic practices, and the Shaman training practice was for the Shaman to teach 1 to 2 successors.  These were selected from candidates that possessed qualities necessary for spiritual combat, and extraordinary physical combat.  This tradition continues for many of the smaller lineages, although the focus on spiritual battle is rare.  It is called the Hermit tradition now, because the teacher often lives as a renunciate (i.e. a person apart from society), and does not take many students during a lifetime.  The Hermit tradition is a highly elitist tradition, as it is derived from one shaman teaching his or her replacement.

b.      Mystery School tradition: I believe the label is a Western one and it refers to religious mysteries.  The mystery schools are predecessors to the temple movements and came after the Hermit tradition.  Mystery schools are centered around one to a handful of teachers and a handful to a few hundred active students.  Some were much larger.  Mystery schools functioned as training, and/or research centers, or production units for Taoist goods and services.  Mystery schools were typically associated with particular clans, or founded by an adept.  Mystery schools were often highly selective is admitting candidates into their programs.

c.       The Temple tradition:  By temple tradition, I am including both shrines and monastic training centers.  For those of you with romantic notions about what drives the formation of temples, and why people join temples, you’re up for a sometimes rude poke in the ribs when we thoroughly dig into that topic.  Temples start for a lot of reasons.  Let’s assume the most altruistic ones in my statements here.  Temples were a means of extending the range of Taoist practice and of providing practitioners with a dedicated training environment.  They were also largely open to all comers when it came to admittance.  The majority of practitioners at a temple are there because they enjoy the environment and the controlled lifestyle.  They are not seriously pursuing enlightenment.  More remote training environments will tend to add admissions standards, have more rigorous training, and also have students that are more directly pursuing enlightenment.

 The 4 Ascendant Spheres Purity Adept School of the Tao is a mystery school affiliated with Soon clan.

• What is Taoism?  Taoism in a nutshell is thousands of years of collected and distilled human methods for the pursuit of enlightenment—or the methods of gathering and using divine truth.  Since these are human methods, they have changed over time and will continue to change over time.  The methods themselves are not divine.  They are human.  Now, Taoism has undergone a number of changes over its many thousands of years of history, and in different phases of its development it emphasized different things.  For that reason there are many different Taoist goals, all of which are Taoist, and Enlightenment did not always dominate Taoism.

•  What will I get out of Taoism if I study it?  Humans spend their days doing three things:
• Managing resources.
• Managing relationships.
•  Engaging in personal development.

If you have a hole in one of these three things, then you will be very unhappy.  Taoism gives you the ability to balance your activities across these three areas, and achieve happiness.

• So what is the book that I should read?  What is the Taoist bible?  It's great that you want further your study of Taoism and explore the Tao.  Taoism is an oral tradition, with nearly all the teaching done orally.  It is not a text tradition.  The text does not have value of divine truth as it does in Western religions.  Texts are intended to be instructional manuals for specific schools or practices, or they function as inspirational literature to fuel one’s desire to pursue Taoist practice.  If you want to explore Taoism through oral instruction, click here: CDs on Taoist Training. 
  
• Reader question: What is Taoism’s position on homosexuality?—I’m including position on Sexuality in general is my response.  There is sect variation on the position regarding sexuality, but there is no position that could be called “prudish.”  There is also no particular condemnation of homosexuality.  Homosexuality is certainly not regarded as a violation of Divine Law, and is really given no special status—positive or negative.  In regards to sexuality in general, the following things should be kept in mind:

a.       If a person is going to engage in sexual activity, the person should be skilled at it and develop his or her sexual knowledge.

b.      Restraint is recommended.  It is rarely to a person’s advantage to behave irresponsibly with qi, and sex depletes qi.

c.       Saturation of the senses, typical of the sex act, should not be a focus of one’s life.

d.      Sexual behavior should follow clearly established relationship boundaries, as established between partners.

e.       Excessive sexual activity is usually an indicator of a poorly met basic need or underdevelopment of the whole human.  Basically, your life is pretty limited if you are occupied with the spread or restriction of sexual behavior.

• What is the Taoist Viewpoint on Love?   This is a long topic, even when written about simply, and it takes up a lot of space.  I have written a 5 part lesson pack on the topic that you can have for free.  Click here and you'll be taken to a separate enrollment page for just this lesson pack.  I want to enroll in the 5 part Lesson on Taoism and Love: “Love is an illusion and love is the foundation of the Tao?”
• What is the Taoist view on Intuition.  I have heard the Taoist intuitive training produces amazing results. You have heard correctly.  Intuition is easily developed because it is a natural feature of all humans, and needs only encouragement to become a full-blown, useable feature.  I have written 3 Free Reports on Intuition found below:
• "What is Intuition?"
• "Simple Secret to Building Intuition"
• "What Powerful Skill Does Intuition Become?"

"How to Seek Taoist Enlightenment"

• What is enlightenment?  Enlightenment is the spiritual goal of Taoism.  Achieving this state is also referred to as becoming a Complete, True or Real Human. 
  
  Overall, the focus of Taoism, what makes Taoism what it is, is the desire to activate the full human potential.  At different times in history and in different sects, this drive to get to the full human capacity has expressed itself in different ways.  One of those ways, the dominant way in this age, is the state called enlightenment.  Enlightenment is driven by a handful of simple initial assumptions about the universe.

a.       All things are Tao.  You are composed of the Tao as all other things are composed of the Tao.

b.      ENLIGHTENMENT IS THE NATURAL STATE OF A HUMAN.  It is how all humans are meant to be.

c.       You live with a representation of reality in your head known as Social Mind.

d.      The True Reality, outside of the picture in your head we are calling Social Mind, is the Tao or the TAO MIND (with big letters to indicate that it is the True Reality).

e.       You are pursuing a more accurate picture in your head, one that better reflects reality, known as tao mind (with little letters to show that it is the representation).

f.        The process of becoming enlightened is the process of having the Social Mind encounter the TAO MIND.  With this encounter, the structure of the Social Mind is gradually changed so that it better reflects TAO MIND.  This is part of the journey to become the tao mind (enlightened).  Repeated cycles of exposure are necessary as each causes a portion of the social mind to change into the tao mind. 

These exposures to the TAO MIND are what we experience as insights—those tremendous aha flashes that can be so potent that they transform belief and cause new action.  Not all exposures to the TAO MIND will be significant or cause change.

g.       Enlightenment is a human label to describe how far a person has passed along on the journey from Social Mind to tao mind.  The placement of this label is arbitrary and varies by the sect of Taoism.  The label of enlightenment is generally an outsider’s term, something that is used by those not very far along in the enlightenment process to describe a goal that is foreign to them.  It is much like a child saying, “I want to become a scientist or I want to become an artist.”

h.       The 4 Ascendant Sphere school places this label at the point when an individual learns primarily from the Tao, and not from the human method (Taoism).  He or she has become a True Human—an infant, but still True.  If you, the reader, at this point want to run around and on the basis of this very brief description declare yourself enlightened, then by all means do so.  The Tao certainly does not care, and frankly neither does anyone on the actual enlightenment path.  If you want to do the work, well that’s a whole different thing.

• Why would I want to be enlightened or pursue enlightenment?  Let me say this clearly, it may not be advisable for you to pursue enlightenment.  You won’t know until you start.  Some people are born with a spiritual impulse—a desire to pursue the great truths like

a.       Why do I exist?

b.      What is my purpose?

c.       What is death?

d.      What was there before time?

Sometimes the spiritual impulse manifests as an intense dissatisfaction with the world (the Social Mind), or the feeling that you are living as a small shadow of yourself.  For such people, trying out the pursuit of enlightenment is advised.  It may be too much work, or they may find out that the impulse is not that strong, but that’s okay.  The discovery alone helps to create acceptance of the human condition.  Monthly instruction on the enlightenment path can be found here:  Taoist enlightenment training.

For people that do not possess a spiritual impulse at all, the spiritual path provides the opportunity for overall development in the big three human activities.  That development creates opportunities for much greater happiness.  As I tell my students, most people find what they are looking for within the first two steps of practice.  There is no requirement to achieve enlightenment, and you have not failed as a person if you do not pursue the big enchilada.  In fact, you accomplish far more spiritually by knowing where you are at.

• How do I actually spiritually develop myself?  What do I do to become enlightened?  This is a complex question, but I'll provide you with as many, simple step-by-step questions as possible.  What I’m going to outline here is a simple 3 level method to get one to a basic spiritual understanding of the universe, provide one with the means of balancing the big three human activities and to get one to a vantage point where the nature of enlightenment can be fully understood.  It should be noted that spiritual progress does NOT come from the intellect.  Thought helps to direct activity, but it is not the activity itself. Talking versus doing is the difference between a couple of old fish wives gossiping about someone versus someone doing something noteworthy enough to be gossiped about.  Being the person gossiped about is a lot more fun, because you’re the person actually doing it.

The Simple 3 Levels of Practice

First Level:

a.       Calm.

b.      Positive Power.

c.       Hygiene.

Second Level:

a.       Stillness.

b.      Acceptance.

c.       Invocation.

Third Level:

a.       The Mind of Clarity.

On average, it is entirely realistic to reach the third level within two years, if it is something that you actually want to do.  Part of the reason you actually go through the practices is to see how far you want to go through the practices, and gain an insight into what your true personal goals are.

Different parts of the human population are going to respond to different parts of the practice.  You don’t have to have a huge, intense resonance with all parts of the practice to be on the enlightenment pathway.  The things that jibe with you are going to change by your age and your situation.  That’s okay.  That’s part of embracing a basic Taoist principle: All things change.  You are not wrong because things change.  That is how it’s supposed to be.

Any single one of these practices can induce insight.  How much insight, and whether or not that insight is going to be useful to you isn’t known.  Any one of these practices is also strong enough to be a primary pathway to enlightenment.

The First Level of Practice

Calm—Calm is not something that should be simulated with the intellect.  So, you don’t want to be sitting around pretending to be calm, when you are not on the inside.  That isn’t actually calm.  That is the appearance of calm.  Meditation is vital to developing calm and is actually the cornerstone practice of Taoism.  Without it, practice is difficult.  With it, practitioners get a direct route to TAO MIND experience.  Calm is a natural outgrowth of the meditation experience.  Meditation is a fascinating practice, and you can read about it here.  You can also purchase an instructional guide for meditation here (move down the page to instructional CDs). 

Positive Power—Positive Power is difficult for people to grasp, because of its simplicity.  It functions by controlling perception, awareness, and choice—the things that make the enlightenment machine work.  SO the difficulty lies in recognizing something like positive power as an actual action, and gradually stripping away the thoughts about what positive power is based on the name “positive power.”  Those perceptions need to be replaced with contemplation and practice.

Here’s a little story that I use to explain Positive Power:  Let’s say you have been placed on a tropical island.  On this island there is a sandy beach.  That beach is a place of plenty.  Lobsters walk up to you on that beach already cooked.  Coconuts fall gently from the trees into your lap with straws already in them.  The views are startling. The sunsets—the oranges and reds possess a beauty that tears up your eyes when you see it.

Also on this island is a volcano.  It belches out sulfurous smoke.  Lava perks from it each day, down the side of the mountain.

You can choose to build your hut anywhere you want.  On the beach, or on the smoking hot lava, among the daily stink.  Where do you build your hut?

The first step of positive power is the positive frame—focusing on the positive events rather than on the negative ones.  The positive focus is not a denial of the negative.  You don’t build your hut on the beach and pretend that there is no smoking hot lava.  You can always see it from the beach.  You simply don’t choose to live on top of the smoking hot lava!  It is also not the same as the saying, “All clouds have a silver lining.”  The truth is that some situations are simply horrible and have no redeeming qualities.  There is no silver lining.  Positive focus is a basic choice to focus on things that went well during a day, even though those things might be in a small, tiny minority.

Humans are inherently positive creatures.  If we are placed mentally into a positive environment our ability to act and clearly perceive is greatly increased.  If we are placed into a negative environment our ability to act and perceive is reduced.  This is simply the way humans are constructed.  It is the nature of positive power.  No matter whether a person is good or evil, the human power is positive.

Positive power does not refer to the rendering of good acts.  A person could be hugely negative and still perform good acts.  That person is simply operating at a dramatically reduced ability because he or she has chosen to live on top of hot lava.

The positive focus leads to positive power automatically.  A simple drill to cultivate positive focus is to spend a small amount of time each day, reminding yourself of things that went well or that you did well.  This helps to teach you where the beach is and to build a house there.  This cultivation time should be done silently to avoid having social baggage placed onto it.  You are certainly free to discuss the overall process with others, but the actual cultivation leave to yourself.

Hygiene—Hygiene refers to the in and out of the body.  Part of that is what we are familiar with when the word hygiene is used in Western thought, namely, the traffic into and out of the body orifices, and the care of the orifices.

When we look at the Taoist concept of hygiene, we are primarily concerned with the flow of sense data into the sensory organs, and seeing what comes out the human in the way of thought and action.

The underlying thought of physical hygiene and sensory hygiene is the same—what you put in directly impacts what comes out.  In a controlled setting like a temple, control of the food stream and having to respond to one’s own personal waste can help make a person intimately aware of the connection between the in and out.  In a modern Western lifestyle, this basic awareness is interrupted by mechanization, because it keeps a person exposed to his or her own effluent only briefly.  When placed into a position of being aware of physical hygiene, most minds easily make the jump that the relationship of in to out also applies the senses.

Okay, background theory aside.  Here are 4 simple ways that hygiene can be directly applied to you own living:

1.      Your environment can be shaped to fill your senses with reminders of your goals of spiritual development.  For example, go to any temple and your going to see a lot of reminders about practice, what the goals are, what you are doing there, etc..

2.      Exposure to sensory information that runs counter to thought processes that you want to develop should be strictly controlled to favor the thoughts and actions you have as your goal.

3.      People are communal beasts and the actions of other humans easily influence what we choose to do.  It is important to cultivate interactions with people that do the things that you have as a goal.  You want to expose yourself to their ideas, expose them to your ideas, and allow yourself to be challenged and supported by them.

4.      The reading of reinforcing material.  Reading material (or some other form of modern media) can be used to fill the senses with information and thoughts that favor your goal.

Hygiene by itself will not override choice.  A person in an extremely negative or extremely positive environment can still think and behave in away that runs exactly counter to the influence of the environment if he or she makes an enormous effort.  Most people will be swept along by hygiene, and that can be good if the hygiene has been shaped in a way beneficial to them.  However, taken out of that environment, people that have not done the underlying spiritual work or have weak karma will be easily changed by whatever influence they are exposed to.

"Is Karma Important in Taoism and What's it Do?"

• What is Karma and why is it important? First, let me say that the word or concept of Karma as it is in the Buddhist and Hindu systems of reincarnation does not exist within Taoism.  The exception to this statement lays in the modern Tao-Buddhist hybrid systems that are popping up.
  
  Karma is the accumulated force of choice.  It is not part of a punishment and reward system for good and bad behavior.  The Tao is all things—good and evil, creation and destruction, birth and death, beauty and ugliness.  For this reason, it does not favor a particular good or bad.  Humans, on the other hand, benefit by having a world that is good, and function better under good than they do evil.  It is for this reason that the world is benefited at the level of the general population by religions such as Buddhism. 
  
  There are three poles of Karma: A Positive pole, A Neutral Pole, A Negative pole.  For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call positive, Good; neutral, Neutral; and negative, Evil.
  
  Karma is accumulated by making choices that fit within a pole.  If you want to accumulate positive karma, then you do positive things, and those positive things add up together to form positive karma.  You gradually climb up the positive pole, and the higher you climb, the more power that you have.
  
  If you are trying to accumulate positive karma, and make a negative choice, you subtract this negative from your positive karma, and so lose power.  If the choice is sufficiently negative, you could end up spending all your Karma or even shifting to the negative pole.
  
  It is equally possible to accumulate negative Karma, and acquire tremendous power.  However, when an evil person does something positive, that person loses Karma as well!
  
  Taoism (i.e. methods of human practice) favors the accumulation of Positive or Neutral in Karma.  Historically, those adepts that have pursued great evil have been killed to avoid creating a world that would be ultimately detrimental to human survival.
  
  Karma is important, because it gives your choices the ability to be successful.  For the most part, when we are powerless to choose, we become unable to manage our selves in the big three human activities.  This shortcoming produces unhappiness.
  
  Karma makes enlightenment more likely, but is not a requirement to achieve enlightenment.  Karma is also not part of reward system that will ultimately lead to enlightenment. Getting more Karma. What’s involved? People start in what I call the Karmic Nursery.  Like being a child in a children’s nursery, much of what you do has no importance to the Tao.  If you want to throw poop, it’s okay because you’re a child.  If you win at checkers, that’s great, but you’re still just a child.  If you want to play blocks, that okay, too.  Victories, defeats, and transgressions are all unimportant, because they are the games of children and do not impact the spiritual world.  Being in the nursery is a willed state, and can be changed at any time.
  
  Most people spend their day doing a little good, a little evil, and a little neutral, because they feel like it. They don’t believe that it has any bad result to it, and it doesn’t have a “bad” result to it.  The result is a Karma that adds up to nothing, and secures a position in the Nursery.  Being in the Nursery is only bad, if you want the power and responsibility that is given to people outside of the Nursery.
  
  To achieve that end, all you need to do is be consistent in choice.
  
  What acts count Karmically?  There is not an easy list of acts that will always produce Karma of a certain type.  People must spend time studying the nature of choice and go through a process of trial and error to reach a true understanding of Karma.  We do have an underlying, inherent sensitivity to choice—it is part of being a human, so the amount of study that we have to do to start accumulating Karma is small.
  
  Our natural human sensitivity to choice is masked by the Social Mind.  As you experience insight and move down the enlightenment pathway, Social Mind weakens and you become much more sensitive to Karma and choice.  Engaging in this type of spiritual development is often a pre-requisite to achieving large quantities of Karmic power, simply because you’re not sensitive enough to Karma or choice to make consistent decisions.
  
  Choices that have Karmic impact:

a.       The impact of your choices upon other things.  You are permitted to have influence upon other things.  You are also allowed to favor your own choices.  This does not change the fact that your choices will have Karmic impact.  The flow of Karma is unstoppable, because the need to make choices is not preventable.

b.      Your impact upon yourself.  Treating yourself well or badly does have Karmic impact—the same Karmic impact that the choices would have if they influenced someone other than you.

c.       Your interaction with your own sense data.  How you choose to interact with sensory information has tremendous Karmic consequences.  It is difficult to understand this concept if you believe that Karma is a reward and punishment system.  After all, sensory information can not be harmed.  However, the choices behind handling sensory information does have a cumulative force to it.  Karma is the cumulative force of Choice.