The first episode of the Neidan Podcast and the load-bearing wall of every episode that follows. Co-hosted by Auge Eidos and Zhiyuan. The episode introduces the show and the controlling image of the forthcoming book The Participatory Cosmos: Daoist and Hermetic Witness Against the Dominion Frame.

Segment 1. A contemplation on chapter 8 of the 道德经, the chapter in which water is offered as the figure for the highest way of being. The reading uses the version that appears in 罗水师父's own published commentary 道解《道德经》 (2016), with the line-by-line teaching translated from his Lecture 30. The Shifu's reading of 善 as a loan-word for 擅 (skilled at, adept at) shifts the chapter from a moral pronouncement about goodness to a description of what water is skilled at being. The seven characteristics of water Lao Tzu names: skilled at the ground, skilled at depth in the heart-mind, skilled at humaneness in association, skilled at trust in speech, skilled at order in governance, skilled at capability in matters, skilled at timing in movement.

Segment 2. The river and the two dams. The first dam, built by what the book calls the Abrahamic Dominator Complex, decides that the river is not the country and that the country is elsewhere, behind the sky. The second dam, built by what the philosopher Mary Midgley calls scientism (distinct from science), decides that the river is a mechanism the country can engineer. Both dams are made of the same stone. Both are now cracking. The participatory cosmos under both dams is the metaphysics that the Daoist, Hermetic, and Indigenous traditions have been carrying for over two thousand years. The segment lays out five structural features of the participatory frame: source-not-separate, cosmos-alive, human-as-participant, knowledge-as-participation, body-as-cauldron. Sources include Mark S. Smith on the displacement of Asherah, Mary Midgley on scientism as myth, Iain McGilchrist on the master and the emissary, and the 庄子 parable of 浑沌.

Segment 3. The weekly 易经 reading. Tonight's cast: hexagram 15 谦 (Modesty), with line 3 (the lone yang, 劳谦君子，有终吉, "laboring in modesty, the practitioner carries through, auspicious") changing into hexagram 2 坤 (the Receptive). The image: a mountain whose peak is below the surface of the surrounding field. The work is real. The earth around it does not have to know. Reading from Wilhelm-Baynes (Princeton Bollingen Series 19, 1950).

Closing. A short contemplation to leave with. Two images for the week: the mountain inside the earth, and the mare on the yielding road. The work continues. The work does not have to be performed.

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