CHAPTER ONE

Optimal Vitality and Health
The philosophy enshrined in the Universal Healing Tao system and its practices is designed to work with your body’s own self-regulating and healing mechanisms to support your innermost thoughts and feelings. The importance of communicating with your own body allows you to engage creatively with the cosmos. Regular Taoist practice brings harmony in the morning, energy in the afternoon, and tranquility in the evening. The simple truth that a healthy body yields a healthy mind is undeniable. So is the truth that we create good health by building positive emotions in the organs and then spreading these emotions out not only to Earth but to the entire universe! Does this increase our awareness and lead us away from our attachment to the purely material, physical aspect of reality that leads to suffering? Of course it does! And for those couples who want to bring new life into the world, Taoist practice increases their self-confidence and extends their ability to instill Healing Love, the very essence of the Tao, in the next generation, thereby creating the basis for harmonious family relationships and ultimately a harmonious world.
The Tao teaches us how to preserve our energy, how to transform it, and how to keep it in our bodies by directing our sexual energy upward, toward our higher, spiritual chakras. If you don’t know how to do this, your vital life-force energy basically ends up going to waste. Take monks and nuns who turn away from the world, saying, "I am holy, I am not of this world." A monk closes his eyes and sees no evil, covers his ears and hears no evil, and places his hands over his mouth and speaks no evil. And he also covers his sex organs so they will do no evil. People who choose a monastic life ultimately say no to sex. The rest of us have no idea what life without sex is like for them. Maybe they take this sexual energy and move it upward in their bodies. Or maybe we should think of them as supermen and superwomen for their superpower of not having or wanting sex? Maybe, unlike the rest of us, monks do not produce any sperm, and nuns cease to menstruate. Of course this cannot possibly be the case—monks still produce sperm, and nuns still have their eggs and continue to menstruate. They cannot deny the sexual part of their being or wish it away. Which is precisely the reason why we sometimes hear about monks who secretly have sex. We’ve all heard about priests in the West who not only have sex but, as we now know, do so with children, because the sexual part of their nature cannot be stilled. Understanding the sexual nature of our being is thus the key to our transformation.
The transformation we’re talking about is nothing less than a change and a renewal of our DNA. This requires sex, orgasm, love, and compassion, as well as synchronizing with the very heartbeat of Mother Earth. The first love vibration we get is from the cells of our father and our mother, who, when aroused, made love and had an orgasm because of their love and compassion. Sex organs to sex organs. They loved each other and wanted to create more love. The man’s best energy is directed toward his sperm, and the woman’s best energy is directed toward her eggs. This energy, the energy of love, multiplies and radiates. We can literally see this when we look at a sex cell: it can multiply over and over, up to fifty trillion times. This is some incredible power!
Science says the human body completely changes its cells every seven years, but the process of duplicating the information for future cells happens continually. This explains how such feelings as anger and hatred can end up lasting for many, many years. The only thing that can wipe these feelings away is arousal, orgasm, love, and compassion. And this is exactly what happens when a woman and a man make love, and the man passes his primal energy to his sperm, and the woman passes her original force to her egg. Tremendous power and energy occurs as a result of the sperm’s primal force and the egg’s original force meeting.
This original, primal force is what draws energy in from the universe, and it is deposited in the very first cell we manifest. It is only later that the soul is drawn into the newly created body, followed by the spirit (sometimes called the subconscious). When all these powerful forces come together, they produce a sound, a vibration. This is the truest sound of life: the beginning of the human pulse. Mere weeks within conception there is already a heartbeat. We take our first breath the moment we emerge from the womb. The beating of the heart that gives us our pulse is forever out of our conscious control, the same way that breathing is unconscious and part of the true sounds of life.
Our brain never stops controlling our breathing, not even when we are asleep, floating between our conscious and our subconscious mind. It is well-known that our subconscious can help us achieve our goals. It usually goes like this: you set a goal, you pray for it, you believe in it. Through the process of setting the goal and praying for its realization, you’re directing your energy from your conscious mind to your subconscious mind. But to actually realize your goal, you need that primal force, and you need a lot of it; if there isn’t enough, you simply cannot achieve what you’ve set out to achieve. Those of us who don’t have enough of that primal force barely have enough energy to sleep, or else they pass on because their subconscious simply does not have the energy to continue.
This primal force, known as chi or prana, controls the nervous system and all the bodily functions. The mind must get to work to generate enough energy so that this primal force can pass from the conscious to the subconscious. Our heartbeat, breath, digestion, absorption, and elimination—indeed, all the physical functions of the body—require direction from the subconscious. One quarter of all our original life force that we receive at birth goes to our kidneys and is stored there for any possible emergencies. For those who do not have a lot of energy to begin with, there will be very little reserves, if any at all, for emergencies. Adrenaline will kick in and the fight-or-flight mode will activate, allowing you to run very fast away from danger and toward safety, toward life. But this will not ensure your survival without wisdom and intelligence playing their part.
When there is no more energy left in the kidneys, it means the end. In this moment of truth, the soul and spirit will depart because there will not be enough energy to do what’s needed to support the physical body. When fighting for their lives, our ancient ancestors would retreat into caves to survive, and the fight-or-flight chemical adrenaline served them well. Eventually, however, humans turned to studying the functions of the body, which in turn prompted the rise of Chinese medicine, acupuncture, and other healing modalities. At that time there was no thought of the afterlife, of heaven and its rewards and hell with its punishments. These ancient Taoists instead looked at the relationship between humans and nature and looked at the universe as a whole. They eventually went on to study human consciousness and the subconscious, the spirit and the soul, which they believed a person could learn to master. They discovered and taught practices that helped us improve our physical and spiritual health, without imposing fear and the concept of hell and punishment, concepts that go back many generations and have been imposed on many of us since early childhood.
Sexual energy is the strongest power we humans possess, and like any powerful tool out there, it can help us or cause us problems. Fire, when handled with care, helps us cook our food and warm our home. But if mistreated, it can easily burn our house down and even burn whole cities to the ground.