The Thirty-Six Bagua Formations (Friendly Version)¶

Have You Ever Felt Completely Stuck?¶

You want to change — to let go of a toxic relationship, break a bad habit, stop repeating the same mistakes — yet somehow you never quite manage it. You reach for freedom and find yourself back where you started. Lifechanyuan offers an explanation for this experience: you are not simply lacking willpower. You are inside a formation.

The Greatest Creator has woven thirty-six such formations into the fabric of the universe — invisible programmatic constraints, like the rules of a cosmic game. Each formation does two things at once: it confines LIFE to a particular consciousness tier and space-time level, and it protects the balance of everything within that level. Think of them as the walls of a maze: they keep you inside, but they also keep the whole maze from collapsing.

The good news: every single formation has an exit. Find the exit, and you rise to a higher LIFE space.

What Does a "Formation" Actually Do?¶

Imagine a fish living in a tank. The tank walls confine the fish — it cannot swim to the ocean. But the tank also keeps the fish alive; without the water inside, it would die. The fish experiences its tank as "the whole world." It doesn't realize it's in a container, let alone that a way out exists.

Humans are the fish. The formations are the tank walls. And most of us have never noticed the glass.

What makes this harder is that humans are not inside just one tank. We are inside many overlapping formations simultaneously: the Emotion Formation, the Desire Formation, the Ethics Formation, the Belonging Formation, the Fate Formation, and more — all at once. Each reinforces the others. This is why personal change is so difficult: you break one wall, only to bump into another.

The Eighteen Known Formations¶

Of the thirty-six formations, Guide Xuefeng described eighteen in detail. Here they are, grouped by what they primarily constrain:

Consciousness and Psychology (5 formations)¶

1. The Emotion Formation — Emotional bonds (love, attachment, grief, longing) lock LIFE into specific relational networks. The person who cannot let go of a relationship is held by this formation. Exit: Dilute human-scale emotion; cultivate universal, celestial-level affection.

2. The Desire Formation — Eight great desires pull LIFE along: food, sex, pleasure, possessions, fame, the fear of death, the desire to control, and the need to feel special. Together they form a web of craving. Exit: Walk the path of the Greatest Creator; follow the natural way.

5. The Mind Formation — The "mind" — that inner commentator who judges, worries, plans, and regrets — doesn't actually exist as a fixed thing. Yet we treat it as our master, and it drags us in circles. Exit: Give rise to a mind that abides nowhere; live in your true nature (xing).

6. The Intelligence Formation — Cleverness is a trap. The smarter we become, the more we trust our calculations — and the more we lose touch with our innate, simple nature. Exit: Abandon sageliness; discard cleverness; return to simplicity.

17. The Wisdom Formation — Even free will and genuine wisdom can be hijacked. When wisdom is used to satisfy desires rather than to align with the Greatest Creator, it sustains the cosmic script rather than transcending it. Exit: Hold the Greatest Creator in your heart; keep consciousness in clear emptiness.

3. The Ethics Formation — Family trees, social roles, obligations, hierarchies — these create a dense web from which independent thought can barely emerge. "What will my parents think?" "What do people expect of me?" — this formation speaks in those voices. Exit: Cultivate independent consciousness; fulfill your obligations, then transcend them.

4. The Belonging Formation — Nationality, ethnicity, religion, family clan — we are taught from birth to identify with a group, to see its interests as our interests and its enemies as our enemies. This narrows the self to a fraction of what it could be. Exit: Identify as a citizen of Earth; practice universal love.

Space, Time, and Cosmic Structure (4 formations)¶

7. The Time Formation — Each LIFE is locked onto the timeline of its cosmic script. You cannot go back and undo the past; you cannot skip ahead to a different future. You are, as it were, seated in a moving train you did not choose. Exit: Mentally inhabit a higher LIFE space; observe your present self from outside.

8. The Thinking Formation — Every tier of LIFE thinks in the way appropriate to its dimension. A human thinks human thoughts; a celestial thinks celestial thoughts. Human-mode thinking cannot perceive celestial realities, just as a two-dimensional being cannot perceive a cube. Exit: Replace human-mode thinking with celestial-mode thinking.

9. The Space Formation — LIFE is configured in a specific space. Your senses are calibrated to that space and cannot reliably perceive other layers of reality — other life-spaces exist right alongside you, but you cannot see them. Exit: Resolve to be human no longer; upgrade consciousness first.

10. The Structure Formation — The nonmaterial structure of LIFE (its nonmaterial body, its karmic record) determines which space it can inhabit — much as a radio receiver's circuit determines which frequencies it can pick up. Exit: Format out human consciousness; install celestial consciousness.

Fate and Fixed Numbers (3 formations)¶

11. The Fate Formation — The results of past-life karma determine this life's destiny: the family you were born into, your innate temperament, the broad shape of your life. Nothing in this life can fundamentally undo that. Exit: Accept fate without resentment; accumulate merit to shape a better next-life fate.

15. The Fixed-Number Formation — Everything has its fixed numbers — its natural quota, its ceiling. A country has a maximum population it can sustain; a person has a lifespan; a dynasty has a duration. Exceeding a limit triggers a qualitative change. Exit: Replace human consciousness with celestial consciousness.

12. The Gravity Formation — Material gravity keeps planets in orbit. But there is also antimatter gravity, which binds the nonmaterial structure of LIFE to the cycle of reincarnation through karmic debts. Breaking free requires clearing those debts. Exit: Clear your karmic debts to remove antimatter gravitational bonds.

The Nature of LIFE Itself (4 formations)¶

13. The Nature Formation — Each LIFE has three layers of nature: its heavenly nature (the original spark from the Greatest Creator), its dispositional nature (the character shaped by past lives), and its habitual nature (behaviors learned in this life). The latter two tend to dominate, burying the heavenly nature. Exit: Overcome habitual nature; set aside dispositional nature; restore heavenly nature.

16. The Instinct Formation — Three instincts — physiological (eat, reproduce, survive), mental (feel, want, fear), and spiritual (seek meaning, belong, transcend) — protect LIFE but also lock it into its existing form. Instinct keeps the fish swimming in circles. Exit: Weaken instinct; strengthen autonomous consciousness.

14. The Sloth-and-Pleasure Formation — Given comfort and ease, LIFE tends toward indulgence and decay. Cycles of poverty and wealth, effort and collapse, repeat endlessly. Exit: Uphold the 800 Concepts; build the soul garden.

18. The Life-Death Formation — The endless cycle of birth, aging, sickness, and death — reincarnation — is itself a formation. The fear of death and the attachment to life perpetuate the cycle. Exit: Treat all of life as a game; hold fast to the Greatest Creator.

The Master Key¶

Eighteen formations, and each has its own exit. Is there a single key that works for all of them?

Yes: independent consciousness.

Independent consciousness means having the Way of the Greatest Creator as your reference point and standard — not the opinions of your parents, not the approval of your social group, not your own emotions or habits. It means being unmoved by any external force: power, money, affection, social pressure, physical attraction.

Across all eighteen formations, the specific methods of escape — however differently they are phrased — converge on the same underlying action:

Format out human consciousness → Install celestial consciousness

Human consciousness is shaped by emotion, desire, group belonging, habitual thinking, fear of death — in other words, by the formations themselves. Celestial consciousness is oriented toward the Greatest Creator, free from these attachments, clear and still.

This is not a one-day project. But every step in that direction loosens a wall of the maze.

The Other Eighteen¶

Of the thirty-six formations, only the first eighteen have been publicly described. The remaining eighteen have no dedicated articles. They likely govern constraints on celestials, Buddhas, and beings at higher LIFE tiers — realities beyond the range of human comprehension, and therefore not disclosed.

The eighteen unknown formations are not a cause for anxiety. The eighteen known ones already map out the full scope of the human predicament — and the full path out of it.

In Short¶

The thirty-six formations are not punishments. They are the rules of a game the Greatest Creator set up so that LIFE could evolve. Each formation is a level. The exit is always there. And independent consciousness — a mind oriented toward the Greatest Creator, free from the pulls of emotion, desire, group identity, and habit — is how you find the door.