I have recently been re-editing the Monkey Press title The Eight Extraordinary Meridians for a reprint. Taken from the perspective of the texts of the Neijing and Nanjing, the book considers these vessels as the first organization of life within a human being, the initial divisions into yin and yang,  interior exterior, above and below being managed by eight principles of government in the same way that the eight trigrams symbolize all possible combinations of yin/yang and the eight winds describe all possible movements between heaven and earth. In treatment they may be used to influence deep-seated and possibly inherited problems because they hold this basic information patterning. Similarly, they have always been considered by daoist alchemists and meditators as a pathway for the return to the origin. Considering this – Claude Larre concludes the book with his own insightful comments.

Claude Larre:

‘These texts, whether medical or daoist, were not written from our point of view. The authors were quite possibly writing from their own experience, and writing from experience is writing from their way of being one with life. We must attempt to understand life by the way it moves and by the way in which it appears. Being practitioners we have a better opportunity to understand this, because what is taught may be true at the level of teaching, but not necessarily at the level of experience. And if we are not able to make the distinction between the teaching and the experience then we are lost.

‘All Chinese texts consider the unknown, the invisible, that which is alluded to or not. That is one of the less understood aspects of all the texts.

‘A large part of divination, which is to see through to the invisible, requires that we first have experience of life. We are experimenting with our own life and the life of the patient reciprocally. And there lies the mystery, the difficulty and the danger.’