YanStep

There are two relationships that are very helpful to know in our studies.
The Creative and Destructive Cycles are ways to understand transformation in Nature..

magic, after all, is all about playing with energy- Energy can be understood the basis of all magic and it too can be understood in terms of Yin and Yang and the Five Phases.

Just as in western traditions of magic one had to master the Four Elements in oneself and in Nature to have any real magical influence (a process symbolised by the Trial of the Elements), so it is so in Taoist magic.
Such knowledge of the transformation of things was discovered by generations of alchemists and magicians and transformation has become a key ability in the Chinese occult.

There are two processes we must understand. The Cycle of Creation and the Cycle of Destruction.
These two processes are essential to not only the calculations of mountain doctors, soothsayers and philosophers but to life and existence itself. The universe is indeed largely illusory if only because the cosmos and everything in it is in a constant state of flux, of coming into being and passing away. Taoists believe as many others do, that this is a temporal reflection in time and space of the Eternal.

Time and space are in turn products of having an observer and the observed. All true philosophies, therefore, recognise the Cycles of Creation and Destruction.... Life and death live in tandem and are brother and sister. Eros and Thanatos, I create and I destroy. S*x and death are thus the Great Mysteries of initiation and sources of raw power in Taoism and other schools of the Mysteries.

Somehow the modern western consciousness has divorced itself from the reality of the mysteries of Creation and Destruction. S*x is a commodity robbed of its creative power and death is a taboo to be feared...

- Jason Read (Practical Chinese Magick)

“It’s beautiful to be alone. To be alone does not mean to be lonely. It means the mind is not influenced and contaminated by society.”

-J. Krishnamurti

Art: Maciej Swieszewski

"As you watch your mind, you discover yourself as the watcher.
When you stand motionless, only watching, you discover your self as the light behind the watcher."

-Nisargadatta