The Neidan Podcast (內丹) is a weekly contemplative podcast hosted by Auge Eidos and Zhiyuan, a married couple studying inside a living Daoist lineage in 南京. The show is recorded as audio. Visual companion videos for hand seals, postures, and brush practice are posted to the show's TikTok.

Each episode reads from one of two source streams: a Daoist canonical text (the 道德经, the 庄子, the 易经) or a Hermetic source (the Corpus Hermeticum, the Tabula Smaragdina, alchemical and Neoplatonic literature). The reading anchors a scholar's conversation on something live in the public square, read through what the hosts call the participatory frame: the metaphysics that the cosmos is alive, articulate when sat with, and that the human is a participant in the cosmic intelligence rather than an external observer of it. The episode closes with a weekly 易经 reading using the bujie format from 高凡先生's 384-yao meditation manual 不解之谜底, paired with a brief contemplation for the listener to leave with.

The show accompanies a forthcoming book by Auge Eidos, The Participatory Cosmos: Daoist and Hermetic Witness Against the Dominion Frame, currently in editorial review. The book argues that the West's ecological, spiritual, and political crises trace to a shared metaphysics, what the book calls the Abrahamic Dominator Complex, and that the Daoist and Hermetic traditions have been quietly carrying an alternative for over two thousand years. The Indigenous traditions of every continent have been carrying their own. The show treats Indigenous voices through Linda Tuhiwai Smith's "cite, do not speak for" protocol: the hosts quote Indigenous authors in their own published words and do not paraphrase as if those positions were the show's.

Auge Eidos brings 26 years inside the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he attained the Adeptus Minor grade and taught the curriculum; he has studied many other magical traditions including Chaos Magick, the practice through which he recognized the structural convergence between the Hermetic and Daoist configurations. He was formally received into a Daoist sect in 2025. Zhiyuan brings two years of formal study at 罗水北斗书院 in 南京 across five disciplines: 北斗易 (the lineage approach to the 易经), 八字 (Four Pillars chart reading), 画符 (the drawing of Daoist talismans), 风水, and 艾灸 (moxibustion in the school's specific form). Both report from inside the practice rather than surveying it from the outside.

The show is two voices only. There are no guests. The Daoist masters whose lineage the hosts study under do not appear on tape; their teaching is brought in through the hosts' direct quotation, translation, and reporting on what they have received. Episodes run roughly 75 to 95 minutes; some run longer when a topic warrants. The polemical edge of the show, when it appears, is reactive rather than predatory: the show responds when the dominion frame's representatives have placed themselves in the public square that week, and works on quieter material when they have not. The water-imagery the show is built around carries the operating principle: water responds to the terrain rather than seeking it out.

If you are tired of the dam and curious about the river, this show is for you. If you are a practitioner already inside a contemplative tradition and want to hear the conversation across traditions, this show is for you. If you are skeptical of both mainstream religion and mainstream secularism and suspect the two might be the same dam in different costumes, this show is for you.

The dam is failing. The river is flowing. The traditions that learned how to live with rivers are still here.