ARTICLE - Understanding & The Complete Reality School

I was brought up in a Methodist family. Both my parents remained chapel goers all their lives, but in a habitual, sometimes rather disheartened manner. I think as they got older they found the evident decline of it essentially disillusioning, but it felt too late for them to jump ship by then. Myself? I started gradually drifting away from Methodism and Christianity in general from my mid teens onward.

Whilst at Art College I was a rather diffident agnostic, who couldn't quite believe atheism had enough to offer. Similarly my affinity with punk music at the time, sat on the fence. I could never bring myself to rebel, anarchy feeling like the very definition of pointless. More a reactive two fingered gesture than a belief system one could devote one's life to.

Once I left college and entered for the first time the dreary reality of daily work, it hit me hard. As a bit of an idealistic daydreamer, I had a rather difficult time with myself and my broken aspirations for a while. It took many years for me to actually find my feet. I'd lost a sense of direction in my life. Then I read Alan Watt's The Wisdom of Insecurity. 

I was that insecure person, a disillusioned thirty year old,so the title alone got me. How could insecurity be wise? Watt's book revealed a different way of having a life with purpose. One that didn't require you to believe in a godhead, but nonetheless had spiritual meaning, aspiration and intent. Taoism for a few years was the embryonic focus for my first steps in spiritual awareness and self understanding.

The Complete Reality School was a movement in Taoism founded in the 10th century that attempted to return Taoism back to its fundamentals. At the same time highlighting the shared common ground with Confucianism and Buddhism, looking for syncretism being a very Chinese desire. The central importance of the metaphorical imagination of spiritual alchemy was also fully restored.

I was then a naive young man, inexperienced in any other eastern approach to religious practice. Apart from Watts, Lao Tzu and Chung Tzu, I read two translations from The Complete Reality School - The Book of Balance & Harmony and Understanding Reality. Very thoroughly apparently, judging by the copious amounts of blue pen underlining in my copy. So I left an impression of getting something from it. I've always found imagery from the Western Alchemical tradition unaccountably exciting, it fires up my imagination in a way not many things do. So, spiritual alchemy, bring it on.

By then I'd read enough about Taoism to know that confounding expectations and wrong footing mere theoretical understanding was all part of the Taoist approach.  The Tao that can be spoken, is not the eternal Tao. My appreciation for the writings of Dogen. a Soto Zen Japanese Buddhist from a similar period as The Book of Balance & Harmony utilises a similar poetic paradoxical and teasing style of discourse. That he echoed some of the form of Taoist discourses, may explain my somewhat instant embracing of his teachings.

On a personal level I knew, even then, that just reading about Taoism would never be sufficient. To get further I'd need to become a practitioner. This was in the late 1980's, where finding out if there was such a thing as a Taoist temple in London, without the internet or zoom, would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.  If it wasn't in Time Out or City Limits, it didn't exist in the UK. And so, I assumed that was the case. Today the internet informs me that the British Taoist Association was formed in 1996. Whether there was anything before that is anyone's guess.

I read The Book of Balance & Harmony in 1989 enthusiastically and knew something in it was useful, but just couldn't decode all of it. The ornate, convoluted metaphors of Taoist spiritual alchemy appeared to this spiritually inexperienced novice unnecessarily obscure and obscuring  My desire for a context for spiritual practice, did eventually find a home when I became a Buddhist in 1993.

2022 some thirty years later, an older and more spiritually experienced practitioner returned to re-read The Book of Balance & Harmony. Just to see if something in my old enthusiasm for Taoism was worth picking up and re-engaging with. The paperback has yellowed and aged a bit, as have I. Whilst much of it still remains intricately bound up in the complexities of alchemical language and concepts, some of it now isn't. Reading it in 2022 is an entirely different experience.  I can see that the teachings about practice I was searching for in the late eighties were actually in there. Twenty five years as a practising Buddhist means I'm now able to recognise them as such.  It is as much a meditation manual as a treatise on Taoist philosophy.

What is spiritual alchemy.? Well, in brief, it adopts the language and forms of physical alchemy. The aim there being the transformation of basic elements inside a crucible into The Philosopher's Stone in the Western Alchemical tradition, The Golden Pill or Elixir in the Chinese. Spiritual alchemy utilises this type of symbolic metaphor to describe elements and stages in meditative practice. The crucible here is ones own body, as energy, essence, mind and spirit transform human consciousness into one fully in alignment with the Tao. I personally still find it meaningfully evocative and imaginatively rich. But here is an extract to give you a flavour for it:-

"Just apply your attention to the point where you rouse the mind and activate thought, concentrating on this constantly - then the mysterious pass will spontaneously appear. When you see the mysterious pass, then the medicinal ingredients, the firing process, the operation, extracting and adding, all the way to release from the matrix and spiritual transformation, are all in this opening.

Gathering medicine means gathering the true sense of the essence of consciousness within yourself. This is done by first quieting the mind to still the impulses of arbitrary feelings; when stillness is perfected, there is a movement of unconditional energy. This is the energy of true sense, and its first movement arising from stillness is called the return of yang. This is to be fostered until sense and essence, energy and spirit, are united. After that, withdraw into watchful passivity, because if you persist in intensive concentration after the point of sufficiency, your work will be wasted.

Thus the cycle of work goes from movement to stillness to movement to stillness. With long perseverance in practice, there takes place a gradual solidification, a gradual crystallisation, which is the stabilisation of real consciousness. This is described as non substance producing substance, and it is represented as a spiritual embryo. This is called completion of the elxir."***

What do I feel about all this now? Well, a lot of it resonates with my present approach to practice and what encourages and supports it. I am not a practitioner motivated much by the exegesis of abstract theory. My practice has been more driven by experience, intuition and faith. Inspired by finding connection and understanding through poeticism in visual or written forms. This still speaks to that instinctive aesthetic knowledge side of me, that was once encapsulated in the epithet Vidya.

*** Taken from The Book of Balance & Harmony, Translated by Thomas Cleary, Publisher Rider.