Category: Longer Works

Balancing Thought and Chi in Meditation

When you’ve been practicing Tai Chi for 15 years you hear a lot about Chi. After all, Tai Chi means “supreme ultimate,” and one of its main goals is to increase the student’s Chi. Just hearing the same definitions repeatedly, though, doesn’t really help you to understand precisely what Chi is. In an attempt to get a better understanding of Chi, I decided to read Chi: Discovering Your Life Energy by Waysun Liao.  

I’ll have to confess that the book is probably over my head, and I question some of the ideas Liao puts forward, particularly this one:

The smarter you are, which is artificially gauged by others who have also lost their true identities, the more artificial you are, and the less natural you are. This indicates even further damage to the quality and integrity of your life energy, Chi.

I don’t know whether to take that personally or not, but it strikes me as an overgeneralization.  It is, however, consistent with his contention that (too much?) thinking makes it difficult, if not impossible, to feel your Chi. 

Practicing Tai Chi often leads you to the same conclusion. In Tai Chi there is no thinking, there is doing.  Nothing will make you lose flow quicker than thinking, either about the next element in the practice or wondering if you left the stove on when you left home.  

Of course, that’s not unique to Tai Chi; it seems to be true in most sports.  Thinking may help in practice, but nothing will make you more likely to miss a basket than thinking, “I’ve got to make this basket.”  I would even go so far as to say that the same is true in Combat, where your reactions must be automatic if you’re going to survive.  

Liao argues when a child is taught to think they begin to lose touch with their Chi: 

Learning to choose whether to act or not act on the basis of thought versus spontaneous feeling will necessarily cause the child to split herself and her mind from her original life energy. Over time, this split grows until it is permanent.

…

The price tag for this split from your life energy is very high. The day you learn to think about how to respond to an outside action, your mind activities begin to burn up your life energy. It is the beginning of the hidden assault and damage to your Chi, and the main cause of its decline. Declining and withering Chi acts like a burning candle in a gusty wind, destined to finally evaporate and vanish.

Now, I’m not sure what “spontaneous feeling” is exactly, but I can imagine situations where it could exacerbate a situation rather than solve it.  I still think Thumper’s mother’s advice (“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all”) is good advice in many situations (though, I’ll have to admit, I don’t always follow that advice).  

It is, however, hard to argue with Liao’s contention that overthinking can drain our Chi.

When we mistakenly overextend our mind until it exhausts itself and detaches from our life energy, it is like the rubber band that has been stretched beyond its limit. A man with weak life energy from the overextension of his mind, or a man whose mind is detached from his life energy, is like an overstretched or broken rubber band. A man whose mind has lost its natural ability to reconnect to its feeling of life energy is a man in illness, a man who has lost his true nature, a man who will decline even unto death.

Overthinking a problem can certainly make it worse rather than helping to solve it. Anybody who has meditated knows that the mind is constantly churning out thoughts that may or may not be relevant to the immediate situation. Constantly worrying about all our problems is exhausting. 

It seems to me that both of these skills are necessary to live well. Chi emphasizes being in tune with natural rhythms and bodily awareness, often advocating intuition, mindfulness, and non-resistance while thinking in the analytical Western sense often emphasizes control, logic, and structured reasoning. Rather than a strict opposition, these ideas can complement each other. Practices like meditation, qigong, and tai chi encourage a balance between thought and energy flow, showing that thinking can be integrated into a holistic system rather than being in conflict with chi. Clear, focused thinking (without excessive worry) might actually help direct chi more effectively.

The Beauty of Nature: A Philosophical Insight

Watts argues that the Chinese view of nature tends to be different than scientists view of nature.  

The fundamental Chinese idea of the order of nature is not compatible with formulation in the order of words, because it is organic, and is not linear pattern. In other words, when we think of beauty we know very clearly what beauty is, but it is absolutely impossible to write down a set of laws and rules that can show us how to create beautiful objects. And mathematicians, for example, often feel that certain equations, certain expressions are peculiarly beautiful. Because they are meticulous people, they try to think out exactly why they are beautiful, and ask if we could make up a rule or formula to describe when beauty will or will not appear. Although they have proposed the criteria of elegance as a new kind of proof to be considered, their general conclusion is that if we could make up a rule and apply it in mathematics, and if we could always by the use of this rule get a beautiful result, eventually those results would cease to impress us as being beautiful. They would become sterile and dry.

I must admit that I had a hard time understanding what Watts was saying here and had to turn to Google’s AI to explain the difference between an organic pattern and a linear pattern: 

An “organic pattern” is a design that mimics natural forms with flowing, curved lines and irregular shapes, often resembling elements found in nature like plants or rivers, while a “linear pattern” is a design composed of straight lines that follow a consistent, predictable path, creating a structured and orderly appearance; essentially, organic patterns are free-flowing and natural, whereas linear patterns are straight and organized. 

In a way, this reminds me that Plato favored abstract reasoning and introspection over empirical observation while Aristotle, on the other hand, stressed empirical observation and systematic study to understand the world, developing the scientific method, focusing on evidence and inductive reasoning to derive knowledge. I happen to favor Plato’s line of reasoning but would still have to concede that Aristotle’s form of reasoning is sometimes needed and, for better or worse,  has largely created our  modern world.

Like Watts I enjoy nature without needing to understand it or to analyze what I’m seeing. 

Many a time I have had intense delight listening to some hidden waterfall in the mountain canyon, a sound made all the more wonderful since I have set aside the urge to ferret the thing out, and clear up the mystery. I no longer need to find out just where the stream comes from and where it goes. Every stream, every road, if followed persistently and meticulously to its end, leads nowhere at all.

And this is why the compulsively investigative mind is always ending up in what it believes to be the hard and bitter reality of the actual facts. Playing a violin is, after all, only scraping a cat’s entrails with horsehair. The stars in heaven are, after all, only radioactive rocks and gas. But this is nothing more than the delusion that truth is to be found only by picking everything to pieces like a spoiled child picking at its food.

I can’t help but think that Watts is actually overstating his argument here. I took up birding because I thought that the birds were beautiful — and I still do.  However, it’s amazing how much I’ve learned about birds since I started birding seventeen years ago, much of what you would only find in a textbook otherwise. That knowledge has made me love birding even more, certainly not less,  than I originally did.  I’ve also met scientists while birding who are doing what they are doing because they love what they’re studying. So, I don’t think the two approaches are necessarily antithetical.  

I’ve long admired some forms of Far Eastern art, particularly Sumi-e, though I hadn’t given much thought to why they were painted the way they were. Watts explains why he thinks they are painted the way they are.

And this is also why the Platos of the Far East so seldom tell all, and why they avoid filling in every detail. This is why they leave in their paintings great areas of emptiness and vagueness, and yet the paintings are not unfinished. These are not just unfilled backgrounds, they are integral parts of the whole composition, suggestive and pregnant voids and rifts that leave something to our imagination. And we do not make the mistake of trying to fill them in with detail in the mind’s eye. We let them remain suggestive.

Watercolors have a lot of the characteristics he mentions and has always been my favorite art medium — yes, even more than photos.  When I have time, I often try to make my photographs look more like watercolors than photographs because I prefer the feeling that creates. I try to recreate what I remember seeing while birding, and I very seldom see things in the same detail that top-end cameras do.  Nor do I particularly want to. If I really want to see what a bird looks like up close, I can go to several different refuges that have stuffed birds like those found on the refuge.  That’s certainly not as beautiful as seeing them in their natural habitat.

Luckily you don’t have to totally agree with Watts says to agree when he says:

It was well said: “The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” The song of birds, the voices of insects are all means of conveying truth to the mind. In flowers and grasses we see messages of the Tao. The scholar, pure and clear of mind, serene and open of heart, should find in everything what nourishes him. But if you want to know where the flowers come from, even the god of spring doesn’t know.

Perhaps by embracing our naturalness and spontaneity and by recognizing the natural beauty that always surrounds us, we can reconnect with the Tao and find harmony within ourselves and the world around us.

Navigating the Observing Self: Lessons from Watts

The opening lines of  the Tao Te Ching, a foundational text of Taoism, serve as a warning to those who take what is written too literally and to those who believe life can truly be conveyed through words. 

The Tao [Way] that can be told of is not the eternal Tao;
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth;
The Named is the mother of all things.

Watts obviously agrees with this idea and doesn’t limit this warning to just the Tao Te Ching; he extends it to life in general, contending that words are no substitute for experience itself. 

… I have often said that the real basis of Buddhism is not a set of ideas but an experience. This of course is equally true of Taoism as well, which like Buddhism recognizes that experience is altogether something different from words. If you have tasted a certain taste, even the taste of water, you know what it is. But to someone who has not tasted it, it can never be explained in words because it goes far beyond words.

If this is true, it’s clear that the best way to learn is through personal experience. Still, it would be incredibly hard, if not impossible, to just learn from personal experience.  So, what can we learn from others?  

And what can others learn from us?  We have all had valuable unique experiences, but how can we show or teach others what we have learned through those experiences if words can’t accurately reflect what we have experienced?  

Watts seems to argue that the first step is to recognize how little we know about how we think. 

In fact we really have no idea how we manage to do any of this, no idea how we manage to be conscious, how we actually think, and how we actually make decisions. We do these things, but the processes and the order of the physical body that underlies them are completely mysterious to us. Even though we can do these things, we cannot fully describe them.

Watt’s feels that in order to begin to understand are basic nature we need to follow the Tao, “feeling our way into our own nature” not thinking our way there.

All the time we are actually relying on this strange and unintelligible form of natural order. It is at the basis of everything we do, and even when we try to figure something out and describe it in words, and then make a decision on the basis of that process, we are still unconsciously relying upon an order that we cannot figure out. That order constitutes our basic nature, but we are too close to it to see it — and so following the Tao is the art of feeling our way into our own nature.

According to Watts, the problem is that we have been brought up to understand ourselves and others through the use of words.

Since we are brought up to make sense of ourselves, and to be able to account for ourselves, we are always expected to be able to rationalize our actions in words. When we try to accomplish this we develop a kind of second self inside us, which in Zen is called the observing self. This observing self can be a very good thing for us to develop, and it can also cause problems, and run a commentary on who we are and what we are doing all the time. It asks, “What will other people say? Am I being proper? Does what I am doing make any sense?”

I must admit that there have been plenty of times when I wished that other people had a conscience, that they had a sense of right and wrong and would abide by it.  On the other hand, as a teacher I’ve seen far too many students who were limited by their self-doubts and prejudices.  I can’t imagine a world without an observing sense, but it also seems impossible to deny that it could cause more problems than it solves.  

Watts argues that when the observing self demands an individual must see the world just in the order of thoughts and words he loses naturalness and spontaneity.

Humans get in their own way because they are always observing and questioning themselves. They are always trying to fit the order of the world into the order of sense, the order of thought and words. And therefore the children lose their naturalness and spontaneity. For this reason we admire the people, whether they be sages or artists, who have the ability to return in their mature life to a kind of childlikeness and freshness. They are not bothered any more by what people are thinking or saying. This is the charm that surrounds the Taoist sages of ancient China.

Worrying excessively about what others think or say about us gives control of our lives to others.  Only when we can react naturally to the events in our life can we be truly free and authentic.  

Le Quin’s “Lying It All Away”

Ursula K Le Guin’s No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters deserves a lot more attention than I’m going to give it, but since  â€?”Lying It All Away” does a better  job of clarifying some of my current attitudes toward society than I can do myself, I couldn’t leave the book without one more blog entry.

Although I was old enough to have heard the speech by President Truman that Le Guin cites at the beginning of her essay, I didn’t hear it because we were too poor to have a TV and I was far too busy playing in the yard with my Fort Apache set to listen to any presidential speech.

I’m fascinated by this historical snippet from the New York Times’s â€?”On This Day” feature: On October 5, 1947, in the first televised White House address, President Truman asked Americans to refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe.

I have no memory of going without meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays as a kid, but that might have been because we were already eating salmon that we had caught two or three nights a week.  Just because I didn’t hear Truman’s speech doesn’t mean my family didn’t share Truman’s concern for those less fortunate than us.  My parents had both lived through the Depression and my mother would tell us how her father would put food out in the alley behind the garage to feed his neighbors who didn’t have a steady job like he hadd. Although we had very little money when I was young mom contributed to the Salvation Army regularly. In other words, we were always conscious of those who didn’t have as much as we did — and we certainly didn’t have much ourselves by today’s living standards. 

Le Guin contrasts Truman’s speech with the current state of America:

At the time, the request was laughed or sneered at by some and ignored by most. But still: can you imagine any president, now, asking the American people to deprive themselves of meat once or twice a week in order to stockpile grain to ship to hungry foreigners on another continent, some of them no doubt terrorists? Or asking us to refrain from meat now and then to provide more grain to programs and food banks for the 20,000,000 Americans living in â€?”extreme poverty” (which means malnutrition and hunger) right now? Or, actually, asking us to do without anything for any reason?

As far as I can tell, the only thing politicians demand of us today is that we sacrifice our kids’ and grandkids’ future so that our ECONOMY can continue to expand — and they can be re-elected.  

According to Le Guin this unwillingness to sacrifice anything for our fellow human beings is part of a larger moral problem:

I have watched my country accept, mostly quite complacently, along with a lower living standard for more and more people, a lower moral standard. A moral standard based on advertising. That hard-minded man Saul Bellow wrote that democracy is propaganda. It gets harder to deny that when, for instance, during a campaign, not only aspirants to the presidency but the president himself hides or misrepresents known facts, lies deliberately and repeatedly. And only the opposition objects.

I suspect you could easily substitute â€?”lying” for the word advertising, at least considering how closely she ties it to the lies told by Romney and Obama.  It used to be that being caught telling a lie could lose you an election, today, even more than when Le Guin wrote this, lying, particularly  repeated lying, may get you elected.

I’m not sure Le Guin is correct when she argues that Obama didn’t have to provide false figures and make fake promises to get elected:

What was appalling to me about Obama’s false figures and false promises in the first debate was that they were unnecessary. If he’d told the truth, he would have supported his candidacy better, as well as putting Romney’s faked figures and evasive vagueness to shame. He would have given us a moral choice instead of a fudge-throwing match. Can America go on living on spin and illusion, hot air and hogwash, and still be my country? I don’t know.

It’s pretty clear that â€?”spin, illusion, hot air and hogwash” have carried the day in recent elections. I’d like to think that will change in the future, but after Trump’s election I have my doubts.  I’ll have to admit that I haven’t listened to a single presidential debate, but that’s because I really put very little credence in what  candidates promise. I trust commercials even less.  Instead, I look at what they’ve done in the past, because that’s the only realistic way to judge what they will do in the future.  It’s hard not to be disappointed in the leaders we elect when they are unable to fulfill the promises they made while running.  On the other hand, how many products we buy every live up to the advertisements that convinced us to buy them in the first place?

Businesses have mastered the art of advertising, the art of convincing people that they need products they didn’t know they wanted and assuredly don’t need.  Small wonder that they’ve found ways to use the techniques they’ve perfected over the years to influence our elections. As Le Guin notes: 

What if some president asked those of us who can afford to eat chicken not to eat chicken on Thursdays so the government could distribute more food to those 20,000,000 hungry members of our community? Come off it. Goody-goody stuff. Anyhow, no president could get that past the corporations of which Congress is an almost wholly owned subsidiary.

Our politicians are so beholding to those who help them attain office that they are afraid to stand up to them even if it’s obviously in the nations’s best long-term interest.

Le Guin believes this unwillingness to sacrifice to help others is tied in with our country’s resistance to taxation.

When did it become impossible for our government to ask its citizens to refrain from short-term gratification in order to serve a greater good? Was it around the time we first began hearing about how no red-blooded freedom-loving American should have to pay taxes?

Those who have the most to lose from high taxes, businessmen who earn astronomical salaries compared to their employees,  have tried for years to convince voters that taxes are un-American, a means of stealing from those who deserve what they’ve earned in order to give it to those less deserving.  They’ve obviously done a good job of convincing voters because those most likely to benefit from tax changes are often the greatest opponents.

Le Guin feels that these changes have taken place because citizens have become short-sighted and are unwilling to think about the consequences of their actions:

It appears that we’ve given up on the long-range view. That we’ve decided not to think about consequences—about cause and effect. Maybe that’s why I feel that I live in exile. I used to live in a country that had a future.

Le Guin’s essay made me  suspect that I have lived in exile even longer than she did.  After serving in Vietnam and later working as a caseworker, I began to question almost everything I had learned before I became an adult. Perhaps simply growing old in a rapidly changing world is a form of alienation.