Once the Big Knife Wind has passed, a different substance starts leaving.
"Following the Big Knife Wind you seem to start ejecting the hardened bone chi out of the body, and sometimes you will see visions of living skeletons during this stage to indicate what is going on, which is that your earth element chi is being transformed."1
Bone chi — defined as "the chi (life force) that flows through the bones," and identified with the earth element.3
Hardened is the word attached to it, which distinguishes this from everything ejected earlier. The illusory-body material comes off as coverings and layers; this comes out as something set.
And it repeats at increasing depths: "there are many stages of this process, for different levels of bone chi or 'earth chi' seem to be ejected at higher and higher cleansing cycles."1
Which places it in the sequence after the heat stage and running in cycles of its own. See Maitreya's Big Knife Wind.
The exit routes are specified, and they are not the same for all of it.
"When going through this stage it will seem as if some parts of the skeleton chi will be pushed out the head, and other parts out the feet, and you will find out which is which after you reach this stage of earth chi purification."2
Two exits, splitting the skeleton between them.
Which is unusual — the general pattern everywhere else is bottom-to-top with a single departure through the crown. Here the structure divides, and which parts go which way is something you learn by having it happen.
The spinal portion goes upward: "the skeletal bone chi of the spine seen to rise out the top of the head."2
And it takes effort. "When you reach this stage, sometimes a little effort, force or push is required to help the process keep going."2
Which is a rare licensing of force in a body of instruction that otherwise prohibits it at every stage — worth flagging precisely because it is the exception. See Never Block a Channel.
Three forms are named across successive cycles, and each has a stated anatomical reason.
A fish. "Due to the resemblance of our sacral bones to the tail of a fish, and since the skeleton chi struggling to rise upwards and out the top of the head is akin to a fish that is swimming against the stream."2
A lobster. At a later stage, "the spinal system bone chi that is ejected resembles a lobster in shape because the finger bone chi seems enlarged and undifferentiated. The chi of an enlarged hand, like a boxer's glove, sort of resembles a lobster's claw when it is ejected with the rest of the skeleton."2
A scorpion. "A yet higher stage in another cycle of ejection resembles a scorpion with a red tipped stinging tail because a discarded covering of the du-mai chi channel accompanies the ejected bone chi, and its red tail end previously terminated at the hai-di's muladhara root chakra."2
Each shape has a component account. Sacrum reads as a tail. Undifferentiated hand chi reads as a claw. A discarded du-mai covering, terminating red at the root, reads as a stinger.
Which is what makes this different from free-association symbolism: the reading works backwards from parts to figure, and the parts are named independently. See Wrestling Is Unwinding.
A ranking of the elements is given, and it explains why this stage takes so many cycles.
"The earth element of the body, like the space element, is extremely difficult to purify. These are the two most difficult elements to transform."3
Earth and space, hardest of the five.
Which fits what earth chi is on this account — the life force in the bones, the densest and most set tissue in the body. The hardest element sits in the hardest structure.
And it explains three things about this stage at once:
Why it comes after the heat. The softer material had to go first.
Why it recurs across many cycles, at higher and higher cleansing levels.
And why a little force is permitted here when it is prohibited elsewhere. Hardened chi does not move like layers of viscous covering, and the one place the material licenses a push is the one place it describes the material as set.
The most striking claim on the page is that this stage explains a Chinese legend, and the derivation is worth examining because it runs in an unusual direction.
The legend: a fish swims upstream against the current and becomes a dragon.
The claimed referent: skeleton chi, shaped like a fish because of the sacrum, struggling upward against resistance to leave through the crown.
The material calls the legend "otherwise inexplicable" without this reading.2
Three features of the derivation:
It uses three independent elements of the story. The fish shape, the upstream direction, and the struggle — and each maps to something stated separately: sacrum, upward exit, and the effort required.
It explains the transformation. A fish becoming a dragon is what happens to the discarded thing — and dragons in this material's decoding vocabulary are chakras and channel structures.
And it is arrived at from the experience rather than from the legend. The sequence given is: notice the shape, notice the direction, notice the struggle, and then recognise the story.
Which is the strongest form the decoding takes anywhere. The reading is not fitted to the legend; the legend is recognised afterwards.
[SPECULATIVE] 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE — one practitioner, no version of the legend cited, and no way to check the order in which the recognition actually occurred.
Expect this after the heat stage, not during it. Different substance, different sequence position, different sensation.
Expect it to recur. Many cycles, at deeper levels of bone chi each time.
Expect two exits. Some of it out the head, some out the feet — and which is which you learn by going through it.
A little push is permitted here. Which is the exception to the standing non-interference rule, stated for this stage specifically: a little effort or force to help the process keep going.
Don't take the shapes as content. Fish, lobster, scorpion — these are what the ejected structure looks like given what is in it, not symbols carrying meaning. The components are the information, not the animal.
And this is why the whole-body work mattered. Hands, feet and spine all appear in these ejections, and the undifferentiated hand chi that makes a claw is the same undifferentiated hand chi described as resolving with practice. See The White Skeleton Visualization.
The iconographic claim is made in two directions and both are worth having.
Tibetan Buddhism's skeletons. The bone-chi ejection "is one of the reasons you see living skeletons in esoteric pictures from Tibetan Buddhism."1
And a practitioner is sometimes given a vision "as if the bones are independently alive for a short while, and the purpose is to teach the practitioner that this is a stage of earth chi purification."1
Living skeletons, briefly animate. Which is exactly what those images depict, and the claim is that they are records of this stage rather than memento mori.
The Chinese schools use different animals. "In the Chinese cultivation schools this stage is not represented by skeletons but by fish, scorpions, lobsters and other pertinent symbols that carry the overall shape of the bone chi skeleton as it is ejected out of the body."1
Same event, two iconographic strategies: depict the thing itself, or depict its silhouette. Which is a real difference in convention and a checkable one — the shapes are supposed to carry the overall shape, so the animals chosen should match the outline. See Iconography as Attainment Record.
An absence is noted directly.
"None of these more advanced stages are mentioned by Hercules or Jason. The idea of a skeleton is good enough and does not complicate the story too much."2
The Greek material stops at the skeleton and does not carry the later stages.
Which is offered as an editorial decision by the encoders — enough to mark the stage, not so much as to burden the narrative.
Two things worth noting about the claim.
It is an absence claim about a specific corpus, and the material states it flatly rather than as not found in the sections read.
And it cuts against the general thesis. If every tradition encodes the same stages, a tradition that demonstrably encodes fewer of them is a data point about how much survives transmission — which would apply to all the other traditions equally.
Which the material does not draw out. What it establishes is that the Greek encoding is coarser at this stage than the Chinese one, and it treats that as a narrative choice rather than as evidence about the encoding process.
Evidence. [PRACTITIONER SOURCE]. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE — one practitioner's account of a multi-cycle stage. [SPECULATIVE] throughout; the legend derivation is unverifiable in its ordering.
Tension — force permitted here, prohibited everywhere. A little push is licensed for this stage, against a standing rule that force is the standard cause of injury.
Tension — the same shapes, two organisations. Fish, lobster, scorpion appear here as separate cycle-markers, and elsewhere as a resolution sequence running hockey stick → scorpion/lobster → salamander → vajra → chandelier. Both orderings are given.
Open question — which parts exit which way? Stated to be knowable only by going through it, which makes it the one detail here that cannot be prepared for.
Open question — why is space the other hard element? Earth's difficulty is explained by the bones. Space is ranked equally hard and given no account at all.
Two ways of holding the shapes, and they suggest different levels of interest.
As diagnostic. Each shape decomposes into named components — sacrum, hand chi, du-mai covering — so the figure tells you which structures are in the current ejection and how far the resolution has progressed.
As irrelevant. The standing instruction on all such visions is to note and ignore, and a practitioner attending closely enough to identify a scorpion's red tail as a du-mai terminus is doing exactly what the material warns against elsewhere.
The convergence, though, is with the resolution claim that runs through the ejection material: undifferentiated hand chi becoming a claw, and later becoming fingers, is the same observation in both places — the pictures get more articulated because the channels do.
Which makes the shapes a report on resolution rather than on content, and that is the reading that survives the instruction to ignore them.
Analogical Thinking — creative practice.
Analogy transfers structure rather than surface. Two things carry.
A good analogy maps relations, not features. The value is in the correspondence between how parts relate in each domain — and an analogy built on resemblance rather than relation looks compelling and predicts nothing.
And the direction of construction matters. An analogy generated from the source and then found in the target is evidence; one generated from the target and fitted backwards is decoration, and the two are indistinguishable in the finished product.
Which gives a clean way to sort the readings on this page.
The fish is relational. Tail-shape and upstream direction and struggle against resistance — three relations, each independently sourced, and the figure follows from their conjunction. That is structure transfer.
The scorpion is more relational still. A red-tipped tail is not a resemblance; it is a specific component (a discarded du-mai covering) with a specific termination (the root chakra) producing a specific feature.
And the lobster is the weakest, because the claw comes from something undifferentiated — a blob of hand chi that resembles a claw for want of definition. Which is resemblance, not relation, and it is the reading that would survive being wrong.
The second finding is the one nothing can settle. The material claims the recognition ran experience-first, which would make it evidence. There is no way to check that from the outside, and the finished analogy looks identical either way.
Practical form: rank a symbolic reading by how many independent relations it maps, and treat any reading that rests on overall resemblance as decoration until it names its parts.
What the source leaves undetermined is whether the two exits mean two processes.
Everything else in the sequence runs one direction: energies start below, rise, exit at the crown, with the root chakra pumping from underneath. A single circuit with a single outlet.
Here the skeleton chi splits — some out the head, some out the feet — and no mechanism is offered for the division.
Which would need explaining on the hydraulic model. A closed loop with a pump at the base does not have a bottom exit; the feet are the return path, not a drain. See Hydraulic Loops, Not Mystical Anatomy.
Three possibilities and nothing chooses between them. Earth chi is heavy and descends — which would make the split a property of the substance rather than of the anatomy. Or the feet exit is the return circuit doing its ordinary job, and the material is being carried out rather than ejected. Or bone chi is genuinely a different system, with its own routes, running alongside the channel network.
The third would be the most consequential, and the material never raises it. The stage with the strangest exit geometry gets no account of it at all.