Transcending the world (Taoism)

During this stage, the "spiritual embryo" having been formed, the work involved is that of gently nurturing it through an extended incubation period until it is fully developed. The natural fire of reality is operated so as to forge and refine it from vagueness to clarity, from weakness to strength. This work, also termed "cultural cooking", is the practice of "nonstriving" or "nondoing", which involves tranquil preservation of clarified consciousness to prevent it from scattering in distraction, whilst calmly watching over the mind. It may be alternated with a "bathing" process, in which there is a deliberate relaxation of striving to avoid the counterproductive accumulation of unbalanced forces. The process of incubation is one of single-minded attention, persistently centered, avoiding imbalance in yin and yang so that they combine appropriately and the spiritual embryo remains complete.

When the final traces of mundanity have been removed by these processes, the practitioner breaks through the undifferentiated, bursting out in a pure spiritual body, unconstrained by the five elements. There is a transmutation by which the formless spontaneously produces form and the immaterial produces substance. The practitioner then transcends the world in a realm of absolutely open nothingness, a state of immortality. The corresponding metaphor is the state before birth or conception. It is a state of mental refinement in which emotional and intellectual attachments to objects of the world, including the ego, have been removed. There is no longer any ultimate subjective identification with the individual body or personality. Consciousness is "spacelike" and merged with objective reality.

The last of seven stages of the Taoist alchemical firing process through which reality is cultivated and the self is restored. It opens the way to two further stages.