SEEING "THE GRIM SLEEPER" IN 1995 IN MY VERY OWN "THE TWILIGHT ZONE" EPISODE -- COURTESY OF THE "NINE FLOWERS" NEI KUNG OF TAOIST ELIXIR METHOD (TAO TAN PAI) KUNG FU SYSTEM

"SEEING" IN THE CASTANEDAN SENSE--FOSTERED BY 21 YEARS OF TAO TAN PAI NEIGONG--ENABLED ME TO INSTANTLY RECOGNIZE A 2ND SERIAL KILLER IN 1995; JUDGEMENT, KARMA & FATE PREVENTED ME FROM KILLING HIM.

In August of 1995—nine years after I survived a gun attack by a psychotic spree killer in Los Angeles named Michael Player, aka “The Skid Row Killer,” I sighted and recognized another serial killer while standing in the checkout line at a supermarket in the same Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles. My recognition, as I will explain here, was entirely by Qigong-enabled ESP.

I had written in my October 9, 2024 Newsletter a detailed account of a shooting incident that took place 38 years earlier on October 8, 1986--that was my closest brush with death and my harshest lesson in anger management. I explained how in perfect hindsight—clarified by superb counseling in the following months—I realized that all four sectors or quadrants of my “life system” —that is, (1.) work-livelihood, (2.) primary relationship & friendships; (3.) hobbies, and (4.) spiritual life— were in distress (abnormally retrenched) and the physical, emotional, and spiritual stress from the sudden and unexpected net deficits in those 4 essential quadrants had “bunched up” into a mighty fireball of stress. My “four quadrants” corresponded with these major stressors: (1) I was demoralized in my work because a career change (to the television industry) that I had worked hard on for one year with my friend and fellow martial artist, Chip Fraser (the son of producer Woody Fraser), had failed. (2) I was depressed in the fall of 1986 after breaking up with my girlfriend, Kathleen Quinlan. But what threw my entire life off kilter—and into the hazard—was my overflowing anger and rage over the utter pollution and defilement of my (3) “hobbies” sector (Chinese martial arts) and (4) “spiritual life” sector (Taoism, Chan Buddhism)—by a former kung fu teacher, a self-proclaimed Taoist “abbot” who had gone rogue and criminal, when three of his young sexual assault victims turned up on my doorstep three years after I had left his school upon receiving my black sash/instructor’s certification. The totality of my conscious anger plus subconscious rage resulted in extreme allostatic overload—such that my visual cognition (or “top-down processing”) was impaired. That is to say, on the night of October 8, 1986, my brain did not recognize the person that my eyes saw as has having a hunched over and creepy posture (and who was lurking about at 11pm in a normally deserted area) to be a dangerous threat! Again, I was so white-hot with anger and outrage and my mind was so full of spiteful disgust that I mistook this one person for a janitorial type being inside a glass-walled building instead of actually being on the outside. As a result of this gross mis-recognition and oversight (in the most literal sense of the word), I turned turned away from the actual danger and took a .38 caliber bullet in the back from him. The LAPD would later identify my assailant as a spree killer named Michael Player, who had murdered ten people in the previous 31 days—all with shots to the head. To this day, I know that I was most fortunate and blessed to have survived. (See my October 9, 2024 Substack article for my account of that attack—that resulted in the assailant committing suicide (with a shot to the head) in his motel room approximately two hours after he attacked me, according to the L.A. Coroner.

I recite this instance of cognitive impairment that almost got me killed in 1986 to contrast my state of mental clarity, emotional calm, physical fitness, and spiritual astuteness nine years later when I encountered a second serial killer, who I later learned was nicknamed “The Grim Sleeper” by the LAPD. In the summer of 1995, my cognition was not impaired in the least, but super-fine-tuned. My energy level and kung fu skill was at least twice as potent as what they were in 1986. For on top of having fully healed physically from the gunshot wound, it was natural for me to take to heart Carlos Castaneda’s teacher don Juan’s No.4 maxim for personal growth and individuation¹ as a “warrior”: “using Death as an advisor.” My “resilience” manifested the following ways:

1. “Out of life’s school of war—what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.” ² -- Friedrich Nietzsche (1888)

After feeling completely steam-rolled and enervated for most of the 11 days while recovering at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from the a gunshot wound to the body mass (as opposed to a limb), I was determined to use every Chinese holistic health resource I had learned over the 14 preceding years to not just heal rapidly and get my life back to normal, but to rebuild myself into a much stronger and wiser person. From the moment I was discharged from Cedars-Sinai on October 20, 1986, on top of going back to a full-time job in management consulting, in my free time, I redoubled my training in Kung Fu, Qigong, and Tai Chi Chuan—and also studied Ed Parker’s American Kenpo Karate³ with Master Ron Chapel, a supercop and Mr. Parker’s No.1 successor (by concurrence by Ed Parker, Jr., along with hundreds of Kenpo instructors worldwide.) Three years earlier in 1983, after nine years of intensive training, I had received my master’s certification (black sash) after traditional rank test witnessed by the public, classmates and participating guest masters that spanned 9 hours. By 1995, I had 21 years of Tao Tan Pai (Taoist Elixir Method) Kung Fu and 15 years of Yang style Tai Chi Chuan training under my belt—both preceded by my initial five years’ of Sifu Douglas Wong’s patented street-fighting style that he called Sil Lum White Lotus Kung Fu (a very evasive style that’s a combination of Mok Gar (known for its “snake hands and rat step” [that includes more foot shuffles than Mohammed Ali could ever come up with [to take nothing away from The Greatest])”, Wing Chun, and Shaolin Crane methods). Plus, in 1995, I was four years into my intensive training in Ehrmei White Tiger Kung Fu and Flying Phoenix Qigong under Grandmaster Doo Wai—a friend and peer to Taoist priest Share K. Lew from whom I learned the Tao Tan Pai Kung Fu and Nei Kung system. I was thus in excellent fighting form and, to use William Blake’s concept/jargon from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” my “doors of perception” were not just “cleansed,” but they were polished to a sparkle.

(2) In 1989, 2.5 years after the shooting incident, I had both gotten back to a corporate career in management consulting (with a financial think tank called The Alcar Group) and in my spare time, I had a creative convulsion that produced two 2-hour instructional videos teaching Yang style Tai Chi form called “Tai Chi For Health, Yang Short Form” ( Cheng Man-Ching’s 37 posture form) and ”TCFH Yang Long Form” (the classical 108-posture Yang style Long Form that I had learned from Gen. Abraham Liu). While having a lucrative consulting job, I was also selling these videos (in VHS cassettes) stacked in my dry bathtub thru mail order by advertising in the Yoga Journal and Inside Kung Fu Magazine. Well, a distributor of Yoga videos called Healing Arts Publishing Inc. (now long gone) saw my Yoga Journal ad and bought my TCFH videos. Then the owner contacted me and proposed a national distribution deal. On May 1, 1991, I signed a distribution agreement with Healing Arts Publishing, Inc. for my two titles. Within a year, my videos were in every major brick-and-mortar store chain that sold videos—Blockbuster, Musicland, Music Plus, Tower Records, Waldenbooks, Duttons’, Barnes & Noble, Discovery Stores, Nordstrom Stores, Costco, Sam’s Club (Walmart), and more. My Tai Chi For Health videos were even in the airline duty-free catalogs. I recall that one of my biggest mail order resellers was Readers Digest, which by 1996 was selling more than 60,000 units per year (!) But the largest direct-mail seller of my videos by far was the Signals Catalog based in Minneapolis, which dropped 42 million high-end video catalogs three times a year. The royalties started pouring in immediately and by 1992, they were more than double my annual salary as a management consultant—and were enough for me to retire from consulting and exit the corporate world in December of that year. Thus, by 1995, I was not under any stress whatsoever as all areas of my life—all four quadrants—were going spectacularly well—especially the work/livelihood quadrant, as I was enjoying a fourth consecutive year of soaring nationwide and Canadian sales of Tai Chi For Health videos that I had produced in 1989 on a shoestring budget of $25,000! It felt very much like being a rock star, as money was coming in from all directions—from expected and unexpected sources.

Instant and Thorough Recognition-Discernment

So in August of 1995, I am in the Ralphs supermarket on La Brea Ave. just north of 3rd Street in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles. I was back in my old neighborhood of the late 80’s visiting my close friends, Nelsen and Drea Valentine, and afterwards picking up some groceries when I saw a person four check stands to my right who instantly triggered half of my “fight-or- flight” reflex—specifically and exclusively my “fight” reflex : Every hair on my body stood on end as I instantly knew with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that this person was an extremely dangerous killer and that HE HAD JUST KILLED SOMEONE. My first and only thought was:

“One false move and I’m jumping over these 4 check-stands, picking up anything hard that I can find, and I will beat him to death.”

—because I knew with absolute certainty that this person was a rampant remorseless murderer. He was unmitigated Evil incarnate. And I had clear, adamantine resolve to kill him should he attack anyone; I was just waiting for him to make that one false move. I never took my eyes off of him, except for a few moments to pay the cashier. My heart was pounding in my temples, adrenalin was surging and I was poised and ready to put all the years of Kung Fu and Tai Chi Chuan training to immediate use. It didn’t matter that he was bigger and looked physically stronger than me—he was about 6 feet tall and about 190 to 200 lbs. and an African American. At that time, I weighed a maximum of 155 pounds. But I had no doubt whatsoever that I could and would take him out if necessary. As I was putting my groceries onto the check stand conveyor belt, I kept my eyes on the murderer. Then I quickly glanced at the cashier, looked back at killer, glanced at the bag boy, looked back at the killer, and then glanced at the person behind me in line. As I’m looking at these three others closest to me, my inner voice was screaming:

“Don’t you see him???!!! Don’t you see what he is??!!! Can’t you see this monster??!!!”

I was experiencing in real life the scene in an old black & white Twilight Zone TV episode that I saw as an early teen in the 1960’s where only one person could see through the human disguise of the alien monster from outer space, while all the other humans around her in a public place are oblivious and just going about their business. The one seer, of course, is going out of her mind. (Btw, kudos to the late Rod Serling for presenting that episode, which turned out to be prophetic of my 1995 sighting.)

When I first caught sight of this dangerous killer in 1995 who I learned later was a serial killer dubbed the “The Grim Sleeper” by the LAPD, I restrained myself from doing anything pro-active because I knew very well what the law was and what I could and couldn’t do as an average citizen—regardless of my special intuition and how clear and accurate my “Shen-gong”⁴ was. Because The Grim Sleeper didn’t appear to be armed and because he hadn’t done anything wrong or illegal, there was nothing for me to do—even though I knew with absolute certainty that he was a rampant serial killer who was fresh from a kill. By 1995, I had taken about 6 years of weekly or bi-weekly classes in Ed Parker’s American Kenpo with Master Ron Chapel, his No.1 successor, who was also a supercop and a legend in police training. Moreover, from 1989 to 2004, I had assisted Ron in quarterly and sometimes monthly A.O.T. weekend seminars for SoCal police agencies. Thus I couldn’t even call a cop over and tell him: “Hey officer, shake this guy, I know he’s dirty and dangerous.” Because he hadn’t done anything and there was no probable cause for any cop to believe that he had committed a crime. Plus, as I knew from observing A.O.T. Maestro Chapel drill and constantly remind all of his AOT students over the years: “people are deemed ‘suspicious’ by what they do, not by how they look.” And to the rest of the world in that Ralphs market that day, this vicious and prolific serial killer looked like an average Joe buying groceries.

Fortunately, the killer exited the market through the north entrance, and I went out the south entrance to my car in that lot. As I got into my car, I was still in “All-out Fight” mode—with adrenalin surging, heart pounding, breathing rapidly, and physically ready to take extreme measures. Then I slowly calmed down over the next 3-4 minutes after realizing that I would not have to physically engage this killer. After the massive adrenalin surge finally subsided and my breathing returned to its normal calm rate, I had a second thought: my conscience/moral compass caused me to doubt myself for a moment as I wondered: “Knowing that he was a wanton killer, who literally thrived on murder and would definitely kill again, was I wrong not to have done anything to stop him? That is, was I wrong not to have either incapacitated or killed him—despite the fact that he hadn’t broken the law in front of me? But that moment of doubt and shading of guilt quickly vanished, as I realized that I had done the best that I could—and all that the law permitted— upon recognizing this person as a killer. My Taoist heart-mind (xin) then told my conscience, “Relax—you perceived dangerous and strong evil with pin-point accuracy and then regulated your primal instincts to kill it—because of your long-cultivated Kung Fu and its code of martial Ch’an (Zen) that was taught by and transferred from the teachers you chose to shape your karma and destiny.” Thankfully, that line of teachers included American Kenpo Grandmaster Ron Chapel who had taught me the law and the boundaries of police work. I again realized that it was not my job to stop him. I was not with the murder police and was not trained to apprehend someone who turned out to be one of the most prolific and insidious of mass murderers to ever walk the earth.

My primal “fight-or flight” instinct that switched on only to “fight”—with the intent to kill—was such an extraordinary, first-of-its-kind experience—that as soon as I calmed down in my car, I called my best friend and mentor in all things supramundane who lives in NYC (whom his friends, clients and many church and community leaders refer to as “The real Angel of Harlem”). My best friend, whom I will refer to by his initials, “DWW” literally saw and profiled this killer through my eyes and my nervous system: explaining that this person I saw was a true vampire. No, not the Bela Legosi-portrayed vampire in Hollywood’s “Dracula” movies; not “Grandpa” (aka, “Count Sam Dracula”)—Herman’s father-in-law played by Al Lewis in “The Munsters” ; not the stylish but clueless vampire-wannabe’s of the 90’s “Goth” movement listening to Sisters of Mercy and Echo and the Bunnymen; and certainly not the Cullen family from the “Twilight” movie franchise, written by some Ann Rice-light. DWW said to me:

”He’s actually much older than he looks. For this is a true vampire; he keeps himself youthful and vital by absorbing the energy [of a certain type] from each person that he kills.”

To me, he looked like your average 29-year or 30-year old male. I choose not to disclose here what kind of energy this vampire was siphoning from his victims, nor how and when he would take it. For disclosing it would not further the public welfare—because it might give the spiritually unfit some very dark and evil motivation to murder. The specific mode of vampirism practiced by this particular killer is a dark yogic reality that I will someday disclose to edify my senior-most students or share with a fellow Kung Fu master or with my Tai Chi Chuan teacher, Master Chen. But it is an act of evil so dark that it is not fit for public consumption.

While this particular vampire’s compulsion to kill again and again might be figuratively called a “blood lust,” it had nothing to do with any type of occult blood ritual or a blood sacrifice, nor was it related to the disease of porphyria⁵, which has a cluster of symptoms that gave rise to the vampire myths starting in the 1890’s. There are some craven, deranged, and psychopathic killers who use their victims’ blood to create more of a grotesque and shocking scene of their atrocities. But this person I saw was not one of those. He was not one to leave scenes of bloody mutilation and thus leaves clues for the police.

[Side Note: The most dangerous true-life vampires are what I call high-level black magicians who are able to furtively siphon energy (life force or “chi”) from other humans—without having to kill them. By definition, their siphoning of life force reduces the normal energy level of their victims and compromises their fitness, balance, endurance, alertness, and overall survivability. I’ve had the misfortune of directly encountering two such vampires so far in my life, which I have since reframed into valuable learning exeriences.]

Again, my sighting of this dangerous killer was in August of 1995 —8 years and 10 months after my 1986 shooting. Looking back almost 30 years, I am pleased to this day over the self-restraint I had upon seeing the killer. By 1995, I had been practicing and teaching 3 styles of Kung Fu for 12 years, after having received a master’s certification (black sash) in ceremony in 1983, and practicing Tai Chi Chuan for 15 years under Master Abraham Liu and had attended thirteen consecutive week-long summer Tai Chi workshops with Master Benjamin Lo in La Honda, in the California redwoods west of Woodside. I was grateful then—as I am now—for my natural survival instincts, my training in all the Taoist and Buddhist hermetic arts that I acquired over 23 years as of that time, and the hard lessons I learned from my preceding cognitive failure in 1986 that enabled my accurate recognition, discernment, and sound judgment upon seeing him in 1995. Chalk one up to: “live and learn.”

At the end of my phone conversation with my best friend, “DWW” from my car, he offered a valuable insight and reminder. He said, “Because your path is martial arts, you will sometimes cross paths with dangerous physical destroyers.” 30 years later, I can verify that insight to be true—based not only by my personal experience, but also on the experience of dozens of fellow martial arts nstructors. For that is the karma of martial arts mastery in a nutshell. Every high-level master of martial arts that I have known (I know predominantly Chinese masters of kung fu and Tai Chi) has had one or more encounters with “dangerous physical destroyers” in civilian life (as opposed to military service or police work) without seeking them out—which required them to use their highest martial skills to pacify or disable them—and always according to the tenet of “Do that which causes the least pain.” That is, mastery of a Chinese martial art means having the wherewithal to apply an “acceleration to violence” that is commensurate to the degree of destruction of health, life, and liberty wrought by the perpetrator. “acceleration to violence” is a term in police-training parlance. But it is also an ancient Chinese Buddhist code of conduct established in the early Shaolin Temple that sets the spiritual guardrails for proper use of one’s martial art:

The Shaolin Creed:

^“Avoid rather the check; Check rather than hurt; Hurt rather than maim; Maim rather than Kill— For all life is precious, Nor can any life ever be replaced— Not even that of the meanest creature.”

On the path to self-mastery, or as Carlos Castaneda put it, “on the warrior’s Path to Knowledge,” every dedicated and accomplished martial arts practitioner will sooner or later come to the spiritual crossroads that my favorite teacher in Tao Tan Pai (Taoist Elixir Method) Kung Fu tradition, the ven. John Davidson, called “one’s moment of Ch’an.” This is the moment in a situation—that comes about unexpectedly— in which one chooses to become either a protector and preserver of all life or a predator and a destroyer of life whenever it suits one. In other words, one chooses to become either a chivalrous warrior or a barbaric asshole.⁶

Now fast forward twenty years: In the spring of 2015, I happened to open the L.A. Times to the Metro Section and my jaw hit the floor when I saw on the front page a courtroom photo of a Lonnie Franklin, Jr. , who was being arraigned in L.A. Superior Court and charged with multiple murders. I instantly recognized his face and his build as the person I saw or “Shen’d” (as we Taoist practitioners say) in the Ralphs Market 20 years earlier. Only now he looked his age. His smooth skin of 20 yrs ago was now dried, pock-marked and lesioned. And his physique was no longer buff and pillar-like but pear-shaped. But he looked even more evil than he did in 1995. He was on trial for the murders of nine women and a teenage girl. Oddly enough and in accord with my karma: a few days later, when I told my friend and fellow dog-owner in Palisades Park in Santa Monica, E.J. Montanez—who works as a public defender in the L.A. County court system—that I had seen Lonnie Franklin, Jr. 20 years earlier in that Ralphs supermarket and that he was now standing trial for multiple murders as the “Grim Sleeper,” E.J. told me that he was offered the job of defending Franklin and that he had declined.

When the LAPD arrested Franklin in 2010, they found 180 photos of unidentified women and hours upon hours of film and video of his victims spanning more than 30 years, including photos of 40 women currently reported as missing by their families or friends. Many of his victims were black female sex-workers. Wikipedia lists 17 persons that the LAPD suspect(ed) Franklin of murdering. Franklin was dubbed the “Grim Sleeper” because of an apparent lull of killings with his m.o. from 1988 to 2002.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_Sleeper

However, my sighting of Franklin in 1995 fresh from a kill and my clear “seeing” and natural knowing of his karma—his doings— tells me to this day that he had never stopped murdering. No. He never took a break. Given his 30-year reign of terror and photo and video evidence the police found in his home, Franklin may very well have been the most prolific serial killer in American history—and perhaps even in world history, possibly exceeding Russia’s Alexander Pichushkin, aka the “Chessboard Killer,” who claimed to have killed 63 people but who the Moscow police was able to prove had killed 48 victims. I believe that Franklin could have been that prolific a killer because I know for a fact, based on my Shen-gong’s “seeing” his energy and spirit, that (1) he was not psychotic but extremely calculating, diabolical and devious; (2) he could never stop (murdering) because aside from whatever depraved psychopathological need he had to lure and kill his female victims, he was physiologically addicted to siphoning off an energy from his victims that kept him youthful and robust for more than two decades. I happened to have learned from experience with another vampire in 1992, who did not kill any humans, but managed to steal their more refined vital energy—akin to what the French call elan vitale—over the course of many years through distraction and subtle mesmerization from a position of temporal power—and who lived to be 102—that that type of vampirism (that energizes and rejuvenates one’s physical body with the energy stolen from others) only works up to a certain age in any human’s life. (This fact, plus my special knowledge in several complete systems of Chinese Yoga, causes me to dismiss as purely gothic fantasy the idea or concept that humans who have turned to vampirism can live for hundreds of years—if they continually drink human blood, sleep in coffins, and stay out of the sun!)

Again, when I sighted The Grim Sleeper in that Ralphs Market in 1995 and recognized what he was, it was not my fate nor my karma to take action against him in that moment—even though my instantaneous mind-body reaction was to kill him over any serious provocation. For Fate had him park in the Ralphs Market’s north parking lot and had me park in the south lot. I never wondered in the past—until now, as I write this—what might have happened had I also parked in the north parking lot. But no need to dwell on that thought for even a second because Franklin was arrested in 2010, arraigned in Los Angeles County Superior court in 2015, and he was convicted on May 5, 2016 of the ten murders. On August 10, 2016 , L.A. Superior Court judge Kathleen Kennedy sentenced him to one death for each of the ten victims named in the verdict. But he escaped the needle because on March 28, 2020 he was found dead of a stroke in his cell in San Quentin State Prison while on death row.

In retrospect, the August 1995 sighting was one hell of a startling exercise of my “Shen Gong” that made me eternally grateful for have consistently practiced “The Nine Flowers” Qigong and the other advanced Tao Tan Pai Yogas I had learned in the 1970’s. It reminded me of what “seeing” is—in the true Taoist sense of the word, which is identical to the Castanedan meaning) and from that moment onward has constantly motivated me to continue my practice of Tao Tan Pai Nei Kung, Ehrmei Mountain Bok Fu Pai internal arts, and Tai Chi Chuan that I was blessed by destiny to have learned (and am still learning). So clearly “seeing” Lonnie Franklin, Jr. in 1995 and then learning that he was “The Grim Sleeper” in 2015 proved to me the value of the Tao Tan Pai Yogas and strengthened my resolve to preserve this sacred Taoist tradition by teaching it to the spiritually fit—along with the equally powerful and enlightening Ehrmei Mountain Bok Fu Pai (White Tiger style) Kung Fu arts and the Yang style of Tai Chi Chuan of the Cheng Man-ching lineage. Because the bottom-line benefit of traditional Chinese martial, yogic, spiritual arts is discernment. Discernment at whatever level one is able to “see”—with the wisdom and experiential understanding that every principle of Taoism holds true at every level of human perception—from the admantine mundane and pedestrian to the Cosmic Ever-Conscious and Void-that-forms.

I must attribute my clear and accurate “seeing” and recognition of the serial murderer Lonnie Franklin, Jr. in that moment in 1995 to my 20 years of practice of the Tao Tan Pai (“Taoist Elixir Method”) Nei Gong system, which consists of six levels of esoteric Taoist Yoga that are practiced parallel to the Tao Tao Pai Kung Fu system. The Tao Tan Pai Kung Fu system has five basic and five advanced animal kung fu forms: Tiger, Dragon, Snake, Crane, and Monkey. (Tao Tan Pai naturalism differs from the Buddhist Shaolin Temple’s style of Five Animals Kung Fu⁷, for the latter has the Leopard Kung Fu forms instead of Monkey acting.)

The Tai Tan Pai Nei Kung (Internal Cultivation) system consists of these six levels of esoteric Yoga—the last two of which, :

1. Tao Tan Pai Basic 31 Meditations (15 standing; 16 seated)

2. Five Basic Animal Kung Fu forms – a martial art / combat system that develops and utilizes Nei Kung (neigong), “internal power.”

3. Eleven Shen Exercises - develops and enhances intuition and psychic awareness

4. The Six Stars (standing exercises that all involve “reverse breathing”)

5. The Nine Petals of the Lotus Flower (aka, “The Nine Flowers”) that perfect “seeing” and other latent powers.

6. The Five Dragons - that develops a visible yogic phenomenon—from which the Ancient Temple of the Yellow Dragon gets its name.

Mastering Level #2, the basic Five Animal Kung Fu forms of Tao Tan Pai, requires 5 to 6 years of intensive training (i.e., a minimum of 20 hours per week of in-class training). Standard form practice, according to Grandmaster Share K. Lew (who brought this art from the Ancient Temple of the Yellow Dragon in Guangdong to America in 1948) is to do each of the Five Animal Kung Fu forms (Tiger, Dragon, Snake, Crane, and Monkey) four times each in one training session. That’s a total of 20 rounds of form practice in each session. That is how you play the Kung Fu—along with realistic full-contact fighting, of course. Such kung fu training conditions the body so that it can withstand the transformative practice of the Tao Tan Pai advanced Yogas (Qigong) and then conduct the super-abundance of internal energy (Ch’i) that the Qigong cultivates:

[Also see Grandmaster Share Lew’s “Tao Tan Pai Lineage Poem” below]

The two most advanced Yogas in the Tao Tan Pai system, the “Nine Flowers” and the “Five Dragons” can be extremely dangerous—and even deadly— to the practitioner if they are not done correctly or at the wrong time of day:
(A) The Nine Flowers Qigong involves repeated massaging of specific acupuncture meridians and organs using the index finger, middle finger, and ring finger of each hand—as one holds each hand in the “Boy Scouts salute” mudra (thumb touching the nail of the pinky finger). If one does this Qigong during the hours of 5pm to 7pm Standard Time anywhere in the world, ONE WILL DIE. Period. Simple as that. You will DIE. Yes, that is how serious and authentic this Taoist Yoga created Taoist Immortal (saint) Lu Tung Pin is. Hence, when forewarned of this temporal death zone by Master Lew, all of us students concurred that we would NEVER practice the Nine Flowers Yoga between the hours of 4pm and 8pm—just to be safe(!) (Another complete Taoist monastic Qigong tradition that I preserve, Ehrmei Mountain Flying Phoenix Qigong, is far more forgiving and almost foolproof so that the average person and absolute beginner can safely and easily derive salient health benefits.) But the yogic and spiritual benefits of the Nine Flowers are worth more than the easily avoidable risk of dying (for one would have to be insanely stupid or suicidal to practice it during the “death zone”). When practiced properly, the Nine Flowers Yoga enables one to see that all planes of reality are intersecting at every Now-Moment (including that of the consensus reality that most of humankind insists is the ONLY reality and agrees to uphold for epochs).

When Grandmaster Share K. Lew first taught the Nine Flowers to us, he said quite plainly and flatly, “This is good for your eyes.” After we had practiced this Yoga for about 4 months, Master Lew then instructed, “Now go practice The Nine Flowers with your eyes open in front of a mirror.” And off we went. The very first time that I practiced The Nine Flowers in front of a mirror, when I got to the second exercise, my vision of myself in the full-length mirror suddenly shifted into tones of gray-and-black and looked exactly like an old fashion black & white film negative. It was a stunning, startling and enlightening moment, to say the least. What I relaxedly saw as more pronounced and outstanding were the spaces between and surrounding the darker facial outlining features of my face and (e.g. the outline of the eyes, the shape of the eyebrows, angles of the cheekbone, the nostrils and tip of the nose, etc.) Then after this shift of vision to B&W film negative mode, I saw my face change in the mirror with every breathe that I took, changing into what I was soon astounded to realize were my karmic past lives. And based on my practice of our eleven Tao Tan Pai “Shen” Exercises, which slowly and gradually develops extra-sensory perception (ESP) and accurate intuition, I followed my intuition and decided to try to fix and hold my “seeing” of one of my past lives for longer than one breath. And once I had learned to fix and hold a past life image through breath modulation and gazing-without-blinking, and using my Shen-Chi (which didn’t happen right away, btw), I was able to commune with it—as if “it” was not always actually a part of “me.” That is how this particular mode of “seeing” that enabled by the TTP “Nine Flowers” Yoga enables one to become truly “self-aware”—and thus make considerable progress towards “CLAIMING THE TOTALITY OF ONESELF”—to use Carlos Castaneda’s perfectly correct semantics that functionally describes spiritual enlightenment. The faculty of “seeing” that is indeed restored and perfected by the six levels of the Tao Tan Pai Nei Gong system propels one towards Carlos Castaneda’s lofty philosophical-sounding goal of the warrior: “claiming the totality of oneself.” And to the extent that one is able to “see” oneself that way and one is able to “fix” that deep level of absorption at will, one is enabled to see ALL human beings and life forms in that mode. And suddenly, the world becomes much, much less mysterious. With more years of practicing the Tao Tan Pai advanced Yogas, one no longer has to strain in any way to “see.” One’s everyday vision naturally simply slips in and out of that deeper B&W film negative mode of “seeing” as one needs to. And I believe that it’s that mode of “seeing”—which can be yogicly developed or just comes naturally to a few very gifted people— that I believe enabled my favorite Catholic theologian to poetically propound and celebrate:

"And now a strange thing in the street seems every human nod, where walk in strange democracy the million masks of God." – G.K. Chesterton

After about 2 months of practicing the Nine Flowers regularly (about every other day), the moment that I stood in front of the mirror and did the very first few breathes of the first exercise, I saw my image in the mirror gently dissolve and disappear in about one second. The dis-appearance wasn’t instant. The feeling of a soothing total brain activation that accompanies the lovely fading away / disappearance of one’s image in the mirror is a benchmark state of an effortlessly expanded consciousness where one feels a complete re-alignment of one’s total being with the flow or the “Big Bang” of the Universe—and one feels it on a cellular level. It is a mentally expansive, emotionally calming and comforting, and a physically blissful-and-sublime, totally healing and transcendent experience of Limitless At-Onement with the Universe. And I believe that is what the Zen people in Japan call “satori.” You feel that you are one with the Whole Works that the nineteenth century seafarer and psychiatrist Maurice Bucke called “Cosmic Consciousness”.

“Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment or illumination which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence — would make him almost a member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as striking and more important both to the individual and to the race than is the enhanced intellectual power. With these come, what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a conviction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.”

Compare his humbling sense of immortality and the realization of and continuing consciousness of eternal life, which is not a belief or a conviction, but indeed a natural knowing. Just like one knows that one’s hair grows, and that one breathes oxygen to stay alive, one knows that the one’s soul is eternal (unattached and independent of any particular personality). This self-realization and higher consciousness is what the Taoist Elixir Method Kung Fu and Nei Kung tradition facilitates and upholds through its very sophisticated and systematic training process, starting with the Tao Tan Pai Basic 31 Meditations series.

To pay homage this this tradition of sacred knowledge begun by Taoist Immortal (saint) Lu Tung Pin during the Tang Dynasty, Taoist priest/Grandmaster Share K. Lew wrote:

There is no Higher Mystery than Attaining the One. Originating Inside Heaven, Wonderfully Excellent Insights Are Born.

The Essence of Nature is Located Floating in the Void. This is the Self, As It Is: Totally True.

Continuously Keep the Clear, Calm Mind Inside. Bring Together (close) the Eyes to Obtain the Golden Elixir.

When Your Cultivation is High, You can Uplift – Society’s Infrastructure and Agriculture.
Your Reputation will be Retained and Transmitted Forever.

– Taoist Master “Intense Phoenix’s” 85th birthday commemoration

At the risk of inciting fundamentalists to do drive-by’s at where they think I might live: I will dare to say that the higher state of consciousness (HSC) called satori in Japanese Zen—or what’s called samadhi in Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism—that’s facilitated or rendered by the ancient Tan Tao Pai Yogas (and every complete system of Yoga in Asia and ancient Persia) seems to be perfectly described in the New Testament in the Book of John when Christ Jesus expressed his spiritual consciousness and his standing with the Creator (the “Father)”— when the Jews were grilling him about his teachings:

“Before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8: 58) “I and the Father are One.” (John 10:30)
“Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, Ye are gods’?”⁸ (82nd Psalm)

When Jesus said, ^{10:30 “}I and my Father are one”, and the Jews took up stones again to stone him, he said, ³²“Many good works have I shown you from my Father; for which of these works do you stone me?” And the Jews answered, ³³“We stone you not for a good work but for blasphemy; for being a man, you make yourself God. To which Jesus replied, ³⁴ “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”. And here, he’s quoting the 82nd Psalm:

⁶ I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. ⁷ But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.

Thus, because Jesus recited Psalm 82 in his defense against charges of blasphemy, this reveals that his statement “I and the Father are One” is NOT Christ telling them that he alone is thee Son of God. But his invoking of the 82nd Psalm must be understood in the greater context of his teachings that he was trying to convince his disciples that they were just as much incarnations of God as he was. And that was also the reason why, as Alan Watts so astutely pointed out in many his excellent books and lectures, Christ consistently refused to demonstrate his divine Powers when his disciples and followers implored him to do so —to match their conception and expectations of a “Messiah” sent to overthrow the Roman government. His holy advice, like all acts of Cosmic Love, was totally ruthless—in forcing them to face the reality of Roman rule—and highly indifferent to their expectations:
”Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” (Matthew 22:21, Mark 12:17, Luke 20:25)

The same point of clarification can certainly be made about Christ’s most widely worshipped declaration of (exclusive) divinity in response to his disciple Thomas asking him: ^14:5 “Lord, we do not know where You are going, so how can we know the way?” And Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.…
Christ is telling Thomas and his disciples, that only through His teachings will they come to know the Father (because Christ is One-with the Father). But what he says in John 14:6 —“I am the way, the truth, and the life.” in the context of Psalm 82, is just another instance where Jesus tried to edify his disciples that they were just as much incarnations of God as he was:

“(You) are ‘the way, the truth, and the life.’ That’s what you really are!“

—Alan Watts’ interpretation of Jesus Christ’s message to his followers in John 14:6 that he gave in so many of his lectures at Esalen throughout the 1970’s (with which I concur). Based on the fundamental fact that in the New Testament of the ancient Aramaic and Greek Bibles, there NEVER occurs the phrase, “The Son of God”—but there are numerous occurrences of, “A Son of God.” Watts explains that the ancient Greek phrase “of the nature of” was later grossly mis-translated as “the son of.” Saying you are, “of the nature of The Father” means “You are divine!” And Watts emphasized that that scripture (properly translated from the Greek and Aramaic) had absolutely nothing to do with paternity.

This interpretation, if you think about it, is entirely congruent with the fundamentals of Nestorianism, which separated from Byzantine Christianity in 431 and took hold in Persia and Mesopotamia and then spread east through Central Asia into China and and the westernmost Mongolic peoples.

(B) However, as blissful and profound an awakening or enlightened Higher State of Consciousness (HSC) that Five Dragons Qigong brings, its success rate is only 33% because it is a yoga of manifestation. Our long history at the Taoist Sanctuary of Los Angeles and San Diego has shown that one third of all practitioners got deathly ill; one third had full-blown, clinically diagnosed psychotic breaks; and one third of practitioners got healthy transformative results—marked by a trebling of one’s energy level at the very least (when one learns this Yoga in their 20’s or 30’s), and in a manner that fulfills all five functional criteria for authentic Qigong:

1. Strengthens immunity so as to prevent disease.

2. Cultivates internal energy (Qi) to be able to heal (some) diseases in oneself and others.

3. Greatly strengthens the body in an integrative manner.

4. Improves intelligence and thereby increases longevity (—as I proven in my 1995 sighting of the Grim Sleeper and decision not to engage him.)

5. Develops and manifests latent powers (e.g., clairvoyance, clairaudience, telekinesis, skrying, distance healing, “Hitting the cow on the other side of the mountain”, etc.)

º These five benefits of authentic monastic Qigong were first expounded in the West by the great Master Tzu Kuo Shih in his excellent, must-read book, “QIGONG THERAPY: The Chinese Art of Healing with Energy” (Station Hill Press, 1995):

A sixth sign of success in the Five Dragons Qigong is cultivating one’s intrinsic Qi to a level where one can physically heal someone at a distance and also harm someone at a distance. Towards the later skill, Tao Tan Pai adepts begin by practicing “candle punching”— i.e., putting out a candle flame at a distance using a punch using fist, open palm, “back-hand,” two fingers (“snake” strike), one index finger, an elbow, or any martial hand techniques—starting at a distance of one foot away and increasing to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 feet and farther. At the highest level of Tao Tan Pai Kung fu (and all complete internal systems of Kung Fu—and of Yoga, for that matter), one demonstrates “activity within inactivity”. That is, the master practitioner demonstrates that the laws of physics are on the plane of mental control. That the energy of one’s environment is “activated” and affected by one’s Shen-Chi giving form to one’s Ching-Chi (“Qing-qi” in pinyin), which in turn Forms the Void or does a “Voiding of the Form” without needing to move one’s physical body. This is the province of the true masters.

Due to the Five Dragons’ rather high percentage yield of failure, we (that is, my senior Tao Tan Pai brethren and I) are extremely careful and cognizant in deciding to whom we teach the advanced Yogas—the The 6 Stars, the 9 Flowers and 5 Dragons. And because I tend to be orthodox, to qualify to learn these advanced Yogas, my students must first have mastered the Five (basic) Tao Tan Pai animal Kung Fu forms and at least two of the TTP weapons forms. Because Tao Tan Pai Nei Kung is so very, very “shen-driven” and also directly circulates the generative force (what Indian yoga calls the Kundalini energy), even the first level of practice, the Tao Tan Pai 31 Basic Meditations series, can cause severe energy sickness if one’s Shen-chi (psychic focus through the eyes) is somehow distracted, improperly focussed, or somehow becomes scattered.

Such is the powerful nature of the Taoist Elixir Method Qigong and Kung Fu that was channeled from Heaven and first taught on earth by Lu Tung Pin during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 CE), and handed down to this day across 25 generations via a semi-secret martial art fraternity called Tao Tan Pai (“Taoist Elixir Method”) Kung Fu, which is related to the Quanzhen (Complete Reality) sect of Taoism, and brought to America in 1948 by the late Taoist priest/Master Share K. Lew, whose Taoist name was “Intense Phoenix.”
Another name for the Tao Tan Pai tradition is “The Golden Elixir School”, as denoted by the Chinese characters at the bottom of this translation of Master Lew’s “Tao Tan Pai Lineage Poem,” which he was inspired to write on his 85th birthday in 1999:

In 1976, at the Taoist Sanctuary of Los Angeles, my senior classmate (Da-sihing), the ven. John Davidson, asked Master Share K. Lew, “What exactly is the Tao Tan Pai School?”.

Master Lew answered:

“We are Pole Star School of Military Exorcism.”

( And the Tao Tan Pai Nei Kung is the vast system of esoteric Yoga that empowers this School’s martial, healing, and spiritual arts. )

[End]

Copyright 2024. Terence Dunn

1. I equate “personal growth and individuation” with Castaneda’s tradition’s (Yaqui Sorcery’s) goals of “becoming a warrior” and “claiming the totality of oneself.”

2. In 1888, Nietzsche wrote “Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens.—Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker,” which can be translated as “Out of life’s school of war—what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.”

3. American Kenpo Karate was brought to America by Master Edmund Parker Jr. It is Chinese-based karate style that evolved from southern Chinese Dragon and Tiger Kung Fu systems and migrated east through Polynesia to Hawaii and finally to the U.S. mainland in 1954. Ed Parker Kenpo is an excellent external martial art that nicely complements and even synergizes with most southern styles of Kung Fu because all its techniques are street effective and can help a kung fu student decode a high percentage of the martial applications and techniques that are codified within their classical Kung Fu forms.

4. Cool logic prevailed—despite my highly adrenalized state, because in addition to studying American Kenpo Karate’s street applications with Ron Chapel after the 1986 shooting (to further decode all the applications of the southern Kung Fu forms I had learned up to that point), starting in 1988, I also observed him over the course of the next 6 years develop his exceptional police tactical training regimen called the “Universal System of Arrest & Control” during his Kenpo Karate classes in Ladera Park. Because Ron had explained to me at different times what the prevailing Arrest & Control procedures were in California, and pointing out some of the LAPD’s (not so great) methods and procedures quite compellingly, and because I knew from my extensive Chinese martial arts background that what Ron was creating was truly a better mousetrap—a superior system of arrest & control techniques and procedures for cops—in the wake of the massive 1992 Los Angeles riot (that stemmed from the acquittal of four white LAPD officers in the severe beating of an evasive and intoxicated black motorist named Rodney King in 1991), I decided to observe him training SoCal cops in state-mandated Advanced Officer Training (“A.O.T.”) seminars. Teaching out of the Rio Hondo Public Safety Academy in Whittier and at a facility at Trade Tech in downtown L.A., Ron regularly trained all the L.A. County Sheriff Offices, the California State Police stations, all the metropolitan police depts. except for the LAPD, the University of California Police, and the L.A. Unified School District Police. In 1994, as a public service, I used my own funds to produce and direct a two-hour police training film titled “Universal System of Arrest & Control for Law Enforcement with Ron Chapel” that fully documented one of Ron’s weekend A.O.T. seminars. As a result of my constant exposure to Ron Chapel’s development of his “Universal System” for six years and to his quarterly-to-monthly teaching of weekend AOT seminars, and becoming well acquainted with his many excellent fellow officers of all ranks and his young proteges in his Kenpo Karate classes from 1988 to 1994, I got quite a comprehensive education in police work. Through osmosis, I gradually learned what day-to-day problems, challenges and dangers patrol cops face, and what types of dangerous criminals they must carefully detain, interview, search, disarm and arrest, what types of crimes the bad guys most often commit in a vast metropolis like Los Angeles, and what statutory and departmental parameters police must operate within as they “protect and serve.” I also learned a bit about the California penal code and what “probable cause” is. Thus, there was nothing for me to do in that situation in the Ralph’s Market except wait for killer to make a threatening or a harmful move.

5. Porphyria is a blood disorder that has existed for a millenia and became prevalent among the nobility and royalty of Eastern Europe.

6. Barbaric asshole = an asshole who in this life or in next life or lives, will reap and eat all the Pain that he has sewn [with some or all of his victims waiting on his ass in the bardo state the moment he or she realizes the death is imminent—as in Shakespeare’s Richard II.]

7. Five Animals Kung Fu (“Wu Xing Chuan” in mandarin or “Ng Ga Kuen” in Cantonese)

8. When Jesus said, ^’30 I and my Father are one”, and the Jews took up stones again to stone him, he said, “Many good works have I shown you from my Father; for which of these works do you stone me?” And the Jews said “We stone you not for a good work but for blasphemy; for being a man, you make yourself God. And ³⁴ Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?”. And he’s quoting the 82nd Psalm:

⁶ I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. ⁷ But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.