outset a practitioner is using ordinary consciousness, not the refined
consciousness referred to by the terms "spirit," "essence" and "wisdom."
2. "Intercourse" and "formation of the embryo" are standard alchemical
images. Chang Po-tuan's classic Four Hundred Words on the Gold Elixir
says, "When husband and wife mate, clouds and rain form in the secret
room.
In a year they give birth to a child, and each rides on a crane " Liu I-
ming explains, "Our real knowledge is yang within yin; this is the
'husband.' Our conscious knowledge is yin within yang; this is the 'wife.'
After the primal yang in people culminates, acquired conditioning takes
over affairs, and the real gets lost outside, as though it lived in another
house and did not belong to oneself. Though one may have conscious
knowledge, the wife does not see the husband; yin being without the
balance of yang, this consciousness has falsehood in it. If the husband,
real knowledge, is recognized and called back home to meet the wife,
conscious knowledge, and taken into the privacy of the secret room, the
husband loves the wife and the wife loves the husband; husband and
wife mate, sense and essence combine, so the primal energy comes forth
from within nothingness and congeals into the spiritual embryo" (The
Inner Teachings of Taoism).
When the text says that "if you entertain any conceptual view at all,
this is immediately a misleading path," this means that conceptual views
