Nepomuk Onderdonk

After reading a few outstanding books on Taoist immortals over the years in the midst of other things, I had just moved to a new place with access to a backyard. I ended up getting myself an alchemy starter kit at Home Depot, and started communicating with the universe; I met the sun and moon, and developed a ritual, “clever and lofty”, and I’ve explained it here.

Ge Hong, and Han Xiangzi: they let you make your own theories as you go through their various stories; they make no effort to preach but you end up making connections between what methods the various people used and how effective and powerful their transformation was, and you might want to be creative after that study and go invent your own method, after they’ve made you such an expert on what works, supposedly.

You come up with your own theory on how you might go about this wild pursuit of “living as long as heaven and earth”, like it's a game, let's see who's ritual is most effective, whose liturgy attracts the attention and beneficence of the heaven.

Taoism is a very do-it-yourself religion, the old ways only a learning trove of what might work, what's worked for others, while you twist and turn in the Way and speculate on the universe for yourself; a ritual, they said, need only be clever and lofty; there’s no pope of Taoism sending out letters of ex communication for false beliefs, or for heretical actions; they pretty much encourage that stuff.

I set aside the “Ge Hong” ideas about alchemy for a few years, but then just recently I read Han Xiangzi, and I started speculating again. Fortunately this speculation led me not to consume poisons like Ge Hong’s characters, but to set up a tripod, a communication between heaven and earth. I invented my own little Taoist immortalism plot, a plan where I am initiating a 101 year study, clinical trial for mankind and the universe around him, plangence of the dark cores study, levels and depths of human kindness study, and magical Taoist ritual for the gathering, storage, and ritualistic release of chi, cosmic energy.
It’s Chan or Zen Buddhism, it’s Taoist alchemy, it's Aztec Nagualism, it's an astrology updated to the modern age of cosmology and astrophysics, where all those things intersect.

So I've invented an irrational little religious ritual for myself, and presented it here - a River-of- Heaven open-topped ferry-ride, all mystery and wonder.