In the spiritual traditions of China, Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, practices and disciplines for refinement of the spirit are common. Qigong is a primary system for spiritual attainment. The practice of Qigong, in this context, is aimed at the evolution and development of the inner being. The body is seen as a local representative of the entire universe. As in the hologram of modern science, the individual is, in a special sort of way, the whole cosmos.

One description of Qigong is as a discipline to "refine the body of pure energy". The acupuncture centers on the front and back primary channels of the "microcosmic orbit" are like energy gates. When the gates are open the Qi develops and circulates. It spills out into all of the channels and circuits. This is called the circulation of the light. When the light is circulating to all of the organs, glands, limbs, tissues and cells the practitioner is filled with, acknowledges and celebrates the light. As the practitioner's attention is fixed on the body of light the dense body of substance becomes secondary. Rather than a physical body with a resonating energy field the individual, from this perspective, is an energy field that has a small dense body of flesh at its center.

Thousands of years ago Chuang Tzu asked, "Is it Chuang Tzu asleep dreaming he is a butterfly? Or is it the butterfly dreaming he is Chuang Tzu." In the Qigong of transcendence it is asked, "Is the practitioner in the deep Qigong state a person in a moment of transcendent energetic experience, or is manifestation in a physical body actually a brief exploration into substance by an entity whose normal state is one of highly refined, resonating light energy". The post Einsteinian physics of the unified field has revealed that our world is composed of dynamic relationships of energy. Therefore, it is not that strange that the practice of transcendence should be as much a part of the Qigong tradition as calisthenics and breathing exercises that lower blood pressure.

Richard Wilhelm's translation of "The Secret of the Golden Flower" is a translation of a beautiful Chinese classic of transcendence that focuses on the "circulation of the light and the backward flowing breath". "Compared to the great Way, heaven and earth are like a bubble and a shadow. Only the primal spirit and the true nature overcome time and space. The energy of the seed, like heaven and earth, is transitory, but the primal spirit is beyond polar differences. Here is the place where heaven and earth derive their being. When students understand how to grasp to the primal spirit they overcome the polar opposites of light and darkness and tarry no longer in the three worlds. Only the seeker who has envisioned human nature's original face is able to do this."(21)