In this festive times, let's address Evil. Uppercase 'e' at that.
Is there such a thing as a Devil ? When aiming at making one's inside empty of thoughts, transparent, "in contact with the universe", does this open a door for Evil to get in ? If it exists, that is.
Now and then, although most likely rarely, there are some mention in QiGong literature (and I think Dr. Yang also mentions it - not certain though) of a 'bad' energy. A bad energy that must be expelled from the body by 'cleaning' QiGong practices.
I reckon that the body mechanism generates waste components everyday as a result of its very functionning. Millions of cells are made waste every day and deep breathing helps in cleaning. But is it possible for a person to actually concentrate and create bad energy ? At the QiGong level I mean. Not by having anger, violence and other emotions like that, but at the energetic level. Anger and violence are expressions of not-so-good energy but they are not created at the energetic level per se. They are mostly overheating emotions, and reactions to external events (sometimes it can be reaction to injustice and murder, which in those cases can put the negativity of such emotions and the manifestation of their energy in another light).
Is it possible for someone following the Tao (even loosely by doing for instance embryonic breathing and small circulation) to actually generate bad energy and generate it by intention ? To be more full of him/her self, to boast more ego, to exerce more calculated power on others for egoistical purposes ? And as such, to incarnate was is termed in many religions or other Good/Bad principles, Evil ?
And also, does the Yin/Yang aproach has somewhere hidden in its basis (surely haven't read anything about this yet) , a God/Devil thing that would say something akin to "if you're not one of us, then you're against us" ? like so many other religions have when pressed and questioned thoroughly ?
So I'm questionning this these days and wanted to share that. I think it is a Good (!) thing to question these things. Is it actually a devilish thing to try to form a spiritual body in the taoist sense ? Does doing this or aiming at doing it actually makes it against nature, against karma, against God ? Or is this rather said by people who would like to bring you into their religion, who would like to restrict your views, to limit your experience of Neidan ? Who consider that taoist pratices are evil ? And I'm not only thinking about blatant Western religions. There are also the same thoughts in Buddhism, or at least by some people who claim to be Buddhist practitioners and are part of Buddhist groups of some sort.
On those questions, cheers