What is the Nature of the Superior Individual?

In the philosophy of the I Ching,  there is a basic truth that in every moment, we have a choice between manifesting the Superior Individual or the inferior person. 

Among those who practice cultivation, however, there may be some question as to just what the "Superior Individual" is.  In the course of cultivation, one might get a sense of the Superior Individual being some outside entity, the "higher self" sending them messages or guiding their life. 

So some have developed a conception where the Superior Individual is some kind of outside spiritual, angelic or divine entity.

But in fact, the Superior Individual is basic part of ourselves. It is not a separate being at all, it is us. The best of us. 

 This sense of differentness, of the Superior Individual seeming like another being with its own intelligence and communicating with us is a product of people's primary identification with the 'inferior person', which is also a part of us. Thus, we have become separate from the 'higher self'.

Why are we separated from our higher self?

We aren't, but it seems this way.

The issue is this: we are a species in the process of evolution. Our consciousness has multiple layers, which can be generally divided into two parts. In the context of I Ching studies (including the Yi Fa work) these are described as "World" and "Heaven". To Nietzche it was "last man" and "super-man". In others, it could be called "animal" and "divine".

 

The Chinese actually say that there are two parts to the human soul: Po and Hung. The Po is the part of us that is animal instinct plus conditioned behavior. The Hung is the part of us that is our fullest potential and true Individuality (as opposed to the 'persona' of our inferior po-soul).

We can, at every moment, choose to associate with one or the other. But on account of our intermediary condition and because of our social conditioning we tend to more directly identify ourselves as the "Inferior Person". So much so, that the Superior Individual can sometimes feel like it's a separate entity, some kind of guiding spirit.

You will find, if you engage with discipline in a sincere long-term course of spiritual cultivation, that over time, you will become more and more identified as one with the Superior Individual. At that point, the 'ideas' of the Superior Individual will be identical to your own, and the notions of the inferior person, which will still be present, will instead be the ones that appear to be foreign.

The Steps of Human Consciousness

 There's a teaching in Chinese mysticism that there are two levels of our consciousness. They're associated with the concepts in the I Ching of the "inferior person" and "superior individual". 

At every moment in space and time we have a choice of which of the two we associate with in our active consciousness, but most people in general associate with the inferior person. The inferior person is a collection of influences and conditionings based on your physical nature, your environment, and the influences of your past and present choices and people in your life.

The Superior Individual is your true nature, what is real about you behind all those things. But in point of fact most people are so disconnected from their true and essential nature that it feels like it is another person. In many rituals used to "communicate" with the Superior Individual, that division is so notable that it feels like the Superior individual is some totally different entity from "ourselves", which is why in western symbolism its called the "Holy Guardian Angel". 

This is also why when one is trying to shift the association of their consciousness from the inferior person to the Superior Individual it feels like dying, like the very essence of who were until now (or rather, who you thought you were) has to be destroyed for you to get to that true self. In a lot of cases, people's motives for getting to that true state involve desires OF the inferior person, so they realize that to get to what's real, they'll have to give up the fantasies of the false person they were, and that's very hard.

This internal conflict is mirrored externally by the struggle between (the inferior person) wanting to imagine one's self the center of the universe, and wanting to have a power that acts on the universe and get to impose its desires on the universe, and the (Superior Individual's) understanding that we are one non-divisible part of reality and are not the central actor but one small part of a very big picture in the vastness of Space and Time, and how this is not something that can just be reasoned out, but has to be experienced through meditative practice and the application of virtue to restore that Union with the Taiji (what in modern English we could call the "Singularity").


So in fact while most of these sorts of studies and articles and ordinary perceptions on the subject of "enlightenment" talk about a two-option process (unconsciousness / enlightenment), the work of spiritual Cultivation is actually a multi-step process of initial glimpses of waking up, initiation, developing discipline, achieving communication with the Superior Individual (in western magick called the "True Will"), working to change one's life and environment to better fit one's efforts at attainment and union, making the shift from general association with the inferior person to general association with the Superior Individual, engaging in teaching or other forms of applying Virtue in the world, attaining states of Union to reality, and finally manifesting that Union fully and becoming the Sage (Enlightenment). There are steps Beyond Enlightenment as well but these are generally not spoken of in lay contexts.

Of the above stages, the big three are:

- Initiation: the beginning of awareness of one's Enlightenment quality, and the start of serious spiritual cultivation.

-Adepthood: the shift into association with the Superior Individual

-Enlightenment: uniting to nature or space-time as a whole (which is to say, overcoming this false notion of separation between self and other, and the self-referencing nature of "thinking you're in the middle of the picture").

 

Finally, I'll note that the very notion that Enlightenment is some kind of separation from the World or one's humanity is ridiculous and disgusting. That's essentially either nihilism or solipsism, the heresies of the gnostics. You can't become "one with everything" by being less human, or less engaged. 

Anyone claiming to be Enlightened while pretending that they don't care about things, or feel things, or that there are certain normal human things that they just don't experience (be it anger, sadness, physical pain, or basic physical needs) are both arguing for Enlightenment being a kind of sub-humanity, and blatant liars.

Enlightenment requires, as my own teacher once said, that you Be More Human.

It's not about separating yourself, it's about Showing Up, being present in the active consciousness.
It's not about feeling less or caring less, it's about Totality. Becoming one part of the big picture, without trying to run away from that big picture, or trying to be right in the middle of that big picture, or trying to control that big picture. It's about being 100% of yourself in the here and now.

Why Do People Hide In Their Own Fake Realities?

Q: why do people try to stay in the center of their own little universes?










 We stay in little universes, that we can pretend we're in the center of. At first glance, this might seem to be a way to get something, to gain some fantasies we have. But it's more about trying not to lose.
We fear being vulnerable, so we shut ourselves up in our own little universes, separating ourselves from reality, as a way to create the illusion of greater control in our lives. If we can be at the center of things that means that we are in control and can avoid dangers and can justify anything we do; of course that's all just delusion, but that's how we imagine it'll work. Instead of accomplishing what you want it to, you become trapped in your own tiny box.

Making yourself NOT the center of your own universe means Losing Control, and having to trust: first of all, to trust yourself, that you won't fail without total control. Most people don't believe in their own abilities, so they create this tiny little box-world where they can feel like the big fish of it (what Reich called the "little man").

Second, trust other people.

And third, trust reality itself.

And those are very hard because what we want is not to be harmed and of course all those things WILL harm us. We will fail (sometimes), we will be hurt by people (sometimes) and life will definitely kill us, eventually.

But the expansion of our fears of those things happening, our failure to go ahead and trust anyways and therefore have a chance of creating purpose for our lives, leads us instead to hide away in that fantasy of self-referencing where ultimately all the things we fear will happen anyways, and on top of that we will have failed to have purpose.

And absolutely, through cultivating Virtue, we grow to understand the pointlessness of trying to put ourselves in the center of our own little universe instead of diving into our corner of the great big one and getting to be one precious part of that.

Flaws in Virtue

The following is an excerpt from a Level 4 text of the Yi Fa Society:

If a practitioner tries to cultivate without Union, he will only be cultivating for himself. His successes might strengthen him, but only reinforce his narcissism. He will start to feel disconnected from the rest of reality around him, and will reinforce the petty interests of his Inferior Person as if these were significant. He will develop a sense of greatness he will not be able to apply to his actual surroundings. In this way, he will eventually subvert all his own progress.

If a practitioner tries to cultivate without Discipline, he will practice in starts and stops. He may at times seek to overcompensate, even practicing in unhealthy ways. He will fall into excuses for why his irregular practice is not a problem, or even how it is unnecessary for him to practice. He may hide in intellect or in emotion, making pretensions of great spiritual feelings or thoughts, while disdaining simple and basic practice. This will eventually mean that he loses all his momentum.

If a practitioner tries to cultivate without Harmony, he will be afraid of his weaknesses, and will put all his focus on his strengths. He will work with great effort at things he's already good at, while neglecting anything he is bad at. He will make a great show of his best qualities, while trying to deny existence of his worst qualities. In this way he will be unable to continue generating Virtue, or receive Gong.

If a practitioner tries to cultivate without Truth, he will delude himself with any fantasy. He may do the physical exercises, but they will exist in his own little bubble. He will interpret Virtue as anything he feels like. He will be unable to receive insight into how to manifest the Superior Individual. He will be unable to manifest Virtue in the world.

Who is the Inferior Person?

In the I Ching, we are presented with a division between two levels of the self: the self as the "inferior person", and the self as the "Superior Individual". One of the most fundamental teachings of the I Ching is that in every moment, we are constantly facing a choice between embodying the inferior person, or embodying the Superior Individual.
 
But if the Superior Individual is our true nature, our consciousness applied to totality, when we are 100% engaged and united to reality... then what is the inferior person? What are you when you are being the inferior person?  And what is the real 'problem' of the inferior person?

First, the inferior person is who you usually imagine yourself to be. In fact, it is a groundless mishmash of transitory influences, from influences of our childhood and past, of our environment, of the influences people and ideas and media have made over our notions of reality and who we are, until we wear it all like a false patchwork skin.Wearing this skin gives us a false sense of security and significance, where we "know who we are" and "what we want", and yet ironically it is the real source of our most crippling insecurities and insignificance.

Yourself as the inferior person is really nothing at all; it's a tiny little man, in a very restricted world.

You make yourself small by shutting yourself into your limiting perspective.

You make yourself a world that's small, by only referring to reality through your own centered lens.

And when you're that small, that you affect only your own little controlled world, then what you do doesn't really matter.

It is fleeting, because it is so limited.

It creates a momentary effect, that all too often crashes against a larger reality it tries to defy, and sooner or later your efforts, that you imagined to be so very great, come to nothing.


So the problem of the inferior person is that they are a 'shut-in'. Instead of showing up, letting themselves be part of reality as it is, they are locked into their tiny fantasy universe, seeing only glimpses of heavily-altered reality through that lens of all their desires and fears and programmed beliefs. This means that they are not able to be effective in the world.

Whereas when you don't insist on being only in the center, when you act in Union and accordance with the whole force of the universe, even very small efforts can move along that flow of reality to make huge changes to yourself and to the world.

Video: Truth Seekers are (Mostly) Bunk!

Most people who emphasize on 'seeking' for truth (rather than finding and working on it) are actually dedicated to avoiding the truth before their very eyes at all cost.

The Yi Fa Cosmology

Some people have asked about the cosmology of the Yi Fa curriculum.

In fact, the cosmology of Yi Fa is directly drawn from the teachings of the I Ching.

There are more details of the cosmology in the teachings of levels 2 and 3 of the Yi Fa curriculum.
What follows is only an explanation in brief.


There is the whole, first off (you could call it the Taiji or the Tao if you like, the absolute sum of all that actually exists).

Then there are certain primal forces (Yin and Yang, the four fundamental forces of existence, the eight elements) which all have archetypal existence. Some of them may appear to have personalities but that's really our way of being able to comprehend them.

Then there's the manifested world, "the World of 10000 Things" as the Chinese poetically put it. It contains all of of those things I mentioned above WITHIN it. Those things are the building blocks of the manifested world, what you find when you look at reality on both the cosmic scale, and by going deep within.

So those elements and primal forces and positive and negative (yang and yin) all exist within us. They take shape to make each of us a unique expression of reality.

Human beings are unique (as far as we currently know) in that we are capable of conscious awareness of these forces. We have Will. Even if most of us never actually use it.

We can use this Will to become conscious operators of those forces, not just reactive operators the way other things in the world of 10000 things are. But that consciousness also creates in us an illusion of separateness from reality. We mistake being Unique for being Apart. And this illusion can be called the Persona.

Since it is an illusion, and we cannot ever actually be apart, it creates a conflict within us between the part of us that is Real and the part of us that is fabricated, the Individual and the Person.  In Chinese mysticism, these are two separate parts of the human soul, called the Hung and the Po.  The Hung is eternal, the Po is temporal and dissolves after death. The Hung is the Superior Individual, the Po is the Inferior Person.

Thus, the cosmology of the Yi Fa curriculum establishes the cause of our human alienation, and also shows the path toward resolving it, by manifesting the Superior Individual.

Dealing With Reluctance to Practice

We ALL have moments where we hunker down and become reluctant to engage in our daily practice of Qi Gong and meditation. The question, and the difference, is what we do after that.  There's two (not incompatible) ways of handling this. The first is to try to reconnect to the joy of doing the practice.  The practice can't feel great ALL the time, but we should in general be able to find things that feel good about practicing.

So one step is to focus on the parts or the ways the practice feels good.  When we're very ill, for example, it's good to do as much as we can of the practice while ill, but not too much more than it could either harm us or sour us to the practice.

When we are for non-physical reasons in a state of malaise, it can be good to figure out and remember those things we like most about practicing, and give ourselves permission to just do those for a few days, to focus on improving those parts. To ignore or de-emphasize the parts we think we don't care for and spend more time focusing on the parts we do.

You could say that's the Yin way.

The second way is to focus on Discipline, and push ourselves forward to practice. To defy our own Inferior Person and take our practice as an act of our own Will to defy what we might happen to be feeling at the given moment. Doing that first, we can start to turn around and find value in our practicing, and then reconnect to the joy of practicing.

You could say that's the Yang way.

The ideal is to be clear on which way to deal with the barriers to our practice at this given time.

The Curriculum of the Yi Fa Society, Level 2

Each level of the Yi Fa Society has its own curriculum, with new material presented for the student's growth, practice and study.  A previous entry already detailed the Curriculum of Level 1.

The Curriculum of Level 2, in brief, consists of the following points:

1. The Level 2 Yi Fa Qi Gong exercise. This is a secret exercise taught only to members of level 2 of the Yi Fa Society program.

2. "Transforming the Inferior Person": a contemplative practice, used by a level 2 student to address those parts of their persona that act as barriers to the Superior Individual, to re-integrate them and remove them as barriers.

3. The Universal Yi Fa Qi Gong: a 50 page secret text that acts as a guide to the theory and study of Yi Fa Qi Gong.

4. "The Three Offerings": devotional practice/ritual to further the development of Union.

5. Secret Techniques of the I Ching: secret methods to determine further insights into I Ching castings, including understanding the origins and further developments of aspects of the present casting, alternate resulting hexagrams, and concepts of Timing to determine duration of casting effects.

6. The Yi Dao: a 22 page text of commentaries on the study of the I Ching.


These advanced teachings are only available to those students who are members of the Yi Fa Society and complete the Level 1 curriculum.

If you are interested in membership in the Yi Fa Society, please contact me!

Fake Qi Gong and People Responsible For It

Here's a great example of totally fake Qi Gong:

The old fraud in this video claims he's using Qi to move everyday objects. In fact, as subsequent investigation found out, the table he was putting all the objects on was rigged with a machine that moved them.

This was a particularly obvious example of fakery, but there are many other supposed "Qi Gong Masters" out there who engage in slightly more clever frauds.  None of them are very clever, however.  For the most part, common sense should allow one to discern fraudulence.

But why are there all these frauds?  Who is really responsible for them?  Of course, on the one hand people like this faker are responsible for the choice to engage in fraud; but the question remains as to why they feel driven to do so in the first place?

There is an old saying: "the reason there are so many fake teachers is because there are so many fake students".  The people who engage in this kind of trickery do so because there are great number of people willing to give them fame, fortune, unmerited respectability, and other benefits for their falsehood.  In turn, these people give this over to the frauds because they in turn desperately want to believe in gaining the types of powers these teachers claim to have. They want to have answers, to fix their problems, to gain fame and be respected as "spiritual people", so they will buy into what these snakeoil salesmen are selling.

If you are drawn to Qi Gong, or to other mystical teachings, it is important to look within to understand the reasons why.  You will likely find that you do have some of these reasons listed above. You may also find that you have a deeper reason: to want to transform yourself, to overcome your own limitations and develop your consciousness.

It isn't that there are just "fake students" and "real students"; this is a question of the Inferior Person and the Superior Individual taught about in the I Ching.  We all have our lower motives and our higher motives: the lower ones lead us, through fantasies and lust of result, to fool ourselves and let ourselves be fooled by otherwise obvious fakes.  The higher ones let us break free and liberate our being.