Cloudwalking Owl

Howdy: I'm interested in whether any folks on this discussion board follow Daoism as a practical philosophy. I've seen a lot of conversation about energetics, Chinese medicine, Qi, and so on. I don't want to be provocative, but I've come to the conclusion that most of this stuff is nonsense. But having said that, I do believe that there is a really practical core to Daoism that has sustained it over the centuries. Let me illustrate with a practical example from my home town. There is a small park that exists where two rivers meet. It is quite nice, but it gets in the way of two major highways connecting. The local engineering department usually controls where roads go and the planning department only gets to "pretty up" the mess that the engineering department creates. The planners really wanted to save the park, but they lacked the power to do so. The local university had a convention of North American timber framers and offered to have a "building bee" as part of the conference if the city would provide the materials and land, plus a project for them to do. Some genius in the planning department decided to get them to build a beautiful covered pedestrian bridge over one of the rivers. They built it and the city fell in love---people get married on the bridge. It's a tourist destination. A couple years later the engineering department decided it was time to connect the two highways and they wanted to build a concrete bridge next to the covered pedestrian bridge. An instant mob of enraged citizens showed up with pitchforks and torches, and Council quickly vetoed the plan to connect the two highways. I never understood what happened until later when a friend who was then a City Councilor and eventually was mayor for several terms explained that the planning department chose the spot and the project specifically to stop the Engineering dept from connecting the two highways. I would say that this was a case of "doing without doing". I would even go a step farther and say that the covered bridge is acting like a "land God" in my city because people worshiping it has resulted in the preservation of nature. I think that as more people in the West adopt Daoism into their lives, it is important to emphasize the concrete ways that Daoist principles can improve people's day-to-day lives.

Well, I've learned a lot about the culture of people who pursue energetic practices from this conversation! Thanks for the help extending my knowledge.

Well there is obviously some sort of mess in this discussion---.

Why do you say "are the effect of the mind trying to apply a label on the actual experience"? What evidence do you have that that is what is really happening? As for reading books, I want to hear about your experiences, not see an appeal to authority. I could find other books that would say different things. Why do your books have a privileged authority over anyone elses?

I'm not trying to prove or disprove "Qi", I'm trying to nail down what people mean by it. There's a famous saying in physics where a theoretician said "this hypothesis is so bad that it's not even wrong". I've been trying to get people to just describe a specific example of where Qi has done something in their life and I've just gotten a lot of vague dancing around. Come on people, I'm not trying to say that you are all liars, I'm just trying to get you to be clear and precise in your language.

Well, ideally I'd like to create a conversation based on evidence presented by someone else so they are on the record as having such and such an experience. It allows me to learn the way they use complex and sometimes ambiguous terms in a way that encourages clearness. It's part of the Socratic dialogue to get people to start off on some common ground before you get buried in the complexities. And I don't want to just say something without basing it on some evidence and clear reasoning---otherwise it's just opinion, which is pretty much worthless on its own. I've already mentioned several very clear examples of experiences (eg: the taking a punch exercise, and, the splitting my visual field into left and right and learning to control which one is dominant) I've had, but which I haven't identified as Qi. I literally don't think that the term "Qi" really explains anything at all, so I think it's much better to just describe the experiences themselves and work from there. Various people on this list disagreed with me, so I asked them to give some clear descriptions of specific Qi experiences they've had. I suspect that most of the folks on this list haven't really thought about most of the issues I've raised and just assumed that I was a naive person who was accusing them of lying about their experiences. I'm trying to do something very different. I know that these experiences happen, because they've happened to me. But I think it's a trap to naively assume that the ancient theoretical descriptions and theoretical explanations are the "be all and end all" of how to understand these things. There are lot of different levels to this stuff, and I suspect that it is a trap to just naively accept other people's explanations about stuff. Perhaps this is part of what is being talked about when the Zen types say "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."

OK. If you don't want to describe a single discrete experience but instead a large category of experiences that you collectively describe as "Qi", can you tell me why you think something that can be so different "electric, magnetic, hold [I assume you meant "hot"], cold etc" how can you tell that they are all the same thing: "Qi"? Couldn't there be a lot of different types of experiences that you are just lumping together? Well, I live in the 21st century even though I have studied under a wide variety of fairly old traditions myself. Even the lineage of Socrates---where I am a recognized Master---goes all the way back more than 2,000 years. Could you give me some of the evidence that led you to believe that your mind is "a conditioned layer of the one awareness. Like waves on an ocean"? I have suggested experiences and scientific research that would suggest that the human mind is not unitary (ie: the split brain research plus the disassociation phenomenon), what evidence would you present in favour of your hypothesis?

I'm afraid that it is impossible to have a useful discussion on this topic. It's obvious to me that a lot of people here are very defensive about their experiences. It sounds like you've had a lot of bad experiences with people saying you are "crazy" or something. That's not what I was trying to say. I was trying to get you to explain clearly and precisely what your experiences are instead of immediately jumping to the assumption that an ancient spiritual theory "explained it all". Alas, I suspect you've had so many bad experiences that you are primed to be instantly combative. I understand how that can happen. But I think it is a spiritual dead end. :-(

No, I'm not saying I think much of anything at all. I'm trying to get people to tell me what they experienced---not what they think they experienced. Do you understand the difference?

Oh, good about these being your direct experiences. I've had many of the same ones plus others besides. Still, I was trying to find a specific example of Qi, not a generalized discussion of all spiritual experiences. It really helps to understand these things if people develop precise language to discuss the different elements. Of course, it doesn't help when different cultures each develop their own language and we try to communicate across cultures (eg: "qi"/"prana"/etc.) Each term has its own subtle emphasis and the way each gets translated into English also brings it's own baggage. That's why I try to get people to just describe their direct, personal experiences, with as little cultural overlay as possible. That allows people to start to communicate with a minimum of confusion. I'm not sure that I used the term "disassociation disorder", the "disorder" is your word, not mine. I'm certainly not trying to "dismiss" the experience. I'm trying to explain that a lot of problems come from the naive psychology that underlies most of our civilization. If we believe that we are a unitary consciousness, and instead what we are is something like a "hive mind" with different elements working together just like the different cells of our body work together, then it's not surprising that different parts of ourselves sometimes have "disagreements" with one another, or, that one part of our mind might want to tell another part something that it doesn't want to hear.

My concern is that people are, IMHO, far too easily satisfied with the ancient theoretical descriptions that they have been given about various experiences. When they were first formulated, they were the "cutting edge science" of their day. Now I think that they get in the way of people's progress in their internal practice.

OK. That's getting closer to what I'm getting at. But as I said before, I wish you'd have used your own words instead of just pointing to someone else. In a court trial this is called "hearsay evidence" and is usually inadmissible simply because the lawyers can't ask the person recounting the experience any questions that might clarify ambiguity or misleading language. Have you ever heard of the experience called "disassociation"? It's a situation where one part of person's being (probably the brain) takes over and does things that the conscious mind doesn't want to do. Sometimes it manifests itself in multiple personality disorder, where someone creates totally discrete personalities that take over from one another. But more commonly, it's just a question of the body moving and leaving the consciousness as a bystander. Disassociation is hard to explain if someone believes in the existence of a discrete, unitary thing known as the "soul", but it makes sense if you see a human being as a collection of different subprocesses that work together through a unitary "operating system" (for want of a better term) that generally co-ordinates some (but not by any means all) of the different functions that keep a human being going. In addition to disassociation (I suspect the two might be related), human beings have the ability to create visions, manipulate their dreams, etc. This process might be of great value in teaching traditions, but it doesn't help to understand things if you put them on a pedestal and don't look at them dispassionately.

OK. Fair enough. I'm trying to balance a great may spinning plates right now. But I'm not trying to get into a competition, I'm trying to explain a subtle concept. And I can only do that if you are willing to engage in the conversation. And to do that you need to be specific. But having said that, I'd like a description of a specific example, not a generalized statement about various experiences. Could you describe one specific example in greater detail? Perhaps I could give you an example of what I am looking for. As part of my training in a Temple I was taught a technique of how to redirect force through my body. We had to go through a process of progressively loosening-up our bodies through various exercises that loosened up the cartilage in our chests. Once that had gone to the point where we had gone through the stage where our chests make really loud cracking and crunching sounds for a while, and then went away, we were "ready". At that point we were taught to stand and another student would hit us as hard as they could in our chests. When we were able to follow our instructions, we could feel the impact as a "wave" (please note the scare quotes are describing more of a metaphor than an actual visible wave---but I suspect that it might be more than a metaphor), then the force travelled to our spines and flowed through it into our hips and then through our legs and into the floor beneathe us. When this happened, we suffered no injuries. If we weren't able to do this, we suffered from very painful bruises that took a long time to heal. That's the sort of description I'm looking for.

I'm afraid that I wasn't articulate enough in my explanation. There is an idea in one school of modern philosophy of learning to "deconstruct" the experience from the theoretical constructs that embed it in our worldview. Let me illustrate with an example. I once explained some recorded music that came from a Bulgarian monastery that had preserved some of the musical traditions of the ancient Greek Orthodox church as "making me feel like I was sitting at the feet of God". The important thing to realize is that this is a metaphor that intimates my own personal emotional response to the music, but it tells another person very little about the music itself. I'm not a musician, but if I were I might talk about the tone, time, key, etc---and compare the music to another style (ie: there were bits that sounded something like types of Arab music.) Someone could even go to the trouble of recording the music and playing the wave form on a computer. Frankly, bringing in concerns about not wanting to make comparisons looks like a "deflection". That is in a conversation where someone changes the subject because they don't want to answer a question for some reason.

Good for you!

I'm afraid you are misunderstanding the question. Saying that it is "pleasurable" doesn't share enough information to let anyone know what you are talking about. Let me help you by asking the following questions: Was the qi localized in one part of your body? Several? Did it move? What were it's properties? Did if feel hot? Cold? Did it tingle? Itch? How long did the event take between beginning and end? Did it happen spontaneously? Did you do something to initiate it? These are just random questions. Any sort of objective description of the experience would help immensely in understanding what you are talking about.

OK. Let's look at one thing you alluded to: consciousness. There was a type of truly horrible epilepsy that was very rare, but enormously debilitating. It was found out that you could cure it by cutting a specific set of nerves in the brain that shared information between the two sides. When this happened, some very remarkable things were discovered. One example was that the different eyes of the patients were attached to different parts of the brain, each of which specialized in different activities. If you separated the visual field of the patients (by putting a sheet of cardboard in between the eyes) you could show each eye a picture of different picture. If you asked the person what they were looking at, they would verbally describe the object that one eye was seeing. But if asked them to write down what they saw, their hand would write down the words describing what the other eye had seen. The implication is that the experience of a unitary consciousness that we "feel" is an artificial construct that unifies a whole lot of different mental and physical experiences. If it were something that is intrinsically unitary, how could a simple surgical procedure cut it in half? &&&& As an aside, learning about this phenomenon influenced my Daoist practice. While studying my poster from the White Cloud Temple, I noticed that my particular copy has the eyes depicted as one being the sun and the other the moon. I wondered if this was a suggestion that human eyes govern different aspects of experience. This led me to wonder if it would be possible to "split" my experience of living into two different aspects---right eye dominant and left eye dominant. Using the practice of "holding onto the One", I spent a lot of time in life working at trying experience the world with different eyes being dominant and then trying to see if I could "balance" them. There is something called "neuro-plasticity", which says that the brain has the ability to rewire itself in order to "work around" specific problems. It's like the way the World Wide Web can work around breaks in the network by re-routing email. This means that through undertaking specific practices---like always being conscious of which eye is dominant at any given moment---you can actually change the way your brain operates. This is how I understand the ancient technique of "holding onto the One". As I see it, the Daoist is like the old man that Confucius met on the banks of the raging torrent. The torrent is life---which includes everything, even science---and the Daoist learns to navigate it by taking advantage of every current that can carry him where he wants to go. I think it's a dead end to reject the wisdom of our age in favour of something from long ago. If they are both wisdoms, then they are brothers and sisters.

Well, to cite a historical example, there used to be two competing hypotheses about combustion. The one based on "phlogiston" and the other on "oxygen". The theory was that there was this "thing" called "phlogiston" that existed in various substances. When it left the substance, it gave off light and heat (ie: fire.) There was another hypothesis that said that instead there was an element, oxygen, that combined with other elements. This process was the basis of fire. According to the phlogiston hypothesis any time something burned, the ashes should weigh less than the original item---because all the phlogiston had been removed. According to the oxygen hypothesis, the results of combustion should weigh more, because the oxygen had been added. The phlogiston idea seemed to make sense according to people's ordinary experience----wood ashes weigh less than wood. But there are types of materials---metals for example---that actually weigh more as ashes after they've burned. Moreover, if you collect and factor in the weight of the fly ash, CO2, etc, from burning wood, the ashes and smoke weigh more than the original wood. It isn't the case that the oxygen hypothesis was proved by these experiments---there might be a further refinement waiting in the wings---but the phlogiston hypothesis was accepted as proven to be false.

Well, a lot of these comments just seem to be emotive statements devoid of an actual argument. An emotive statement boils down to saying "Yay! I agree" or "Bah! I disagree." I really did want to avoid talking about qi, but since people are interested in the subject, I'd like to put the shoe on the other foot. Would someone please give me an example of their experience of Qi and try to describe it in totally neutral terms? I have had several experiences that others have described as being "qi", but I'd like to compare what the people who have commented on this list have experienced with what I have. It might be that I have never had the experiences that these other folks have had, and as a result, I am totally "out to lunch" on this issue.

Well, there are hypotheses about consciousness, emotion and self-awareness. I wonder what exactly you mean by the word "explain"? True, science cannot prove---but it can disprove.

I have found that there is a ancient Daoist practice called "holding onto the One" (it's mentioned in both the Nei Yeh and the Taiping Jing.) As I practice it, it is something like Buddhist mindfulness practice, but with a significant difference. Where mindfulness is aimed at bringing piece of mind through developing a detached, objective viewpoint, "holding onto the One" is a process of retaining your objective distance while at the same time looking as carefully as possible at the situation so you can learn the individual dao that underlies the process you are watching. If attempt to do this all the time, I have found that you will develop a more centred, aware consciousness while at the same time learning the subtleties that govern the world around us. This will allow one to develop the sort of "masterful" kung fu that Zhuangzi talks about. The process of holding onto the One for a long period of time and with regard to a large number of different daos, one will begin to learn and understand the greater Dao that underlies all the others. In the story from the original post, someone in the planning department of my city had decided that the only way to overcome the Engineering dept would be by mobilizing public support. And he or she realized that people have a great deal of nostalgia for timber frame construction and covered bridges. So when the opportunity arose they decided to take advantage of it to preserve the park.

Brevity is the essence of wit.

I spent years doing various things and believed in the idea of qi. I felt it flow through my body, I studied the esoteric map of the human body that was found at the White Cloud Temple. I even chanted the Jade Emperor sutra and regularly offered incense to an altar. At the same time that I did all of this I was an avid reader of popular science and more (I have a Master's in Philosophy.) I came to the conclusion that most of the experiences that I was having could be explained in better ways using modern scientific theory. The feelings that I had of "qi" going through my body and the various abilities that was able to manifest could be explained better through neuroplasticity than through some mysterious substance. At the same time, I enjoyed watching the feats of various "qi" masters both in person and through video. In most cases it was obvious that what was being done had nothing at all to do with Qi and were just demonstrations of basic physical principles. Others looked to me to be not much more than stage magic (and often not very good stage magic.) At the same time, I played around a bit with the ability to project the image of being a "wise and groovy master", and found out that it is profoundly easy to convince some people that you are some sort of wizard simply be knowing a few things that they do not. I also learned how seductive it is to cultivate this persona as it gives you a degree of unhealthy control over other people. (This is why I cultivate an persona of being "punk and plain", I never want anyone to put me on a pedestal again!) I have had a few experiences that are hard to explain given modern theory. But I don't believe that Daoist energetics are any better than they at explaining them. So I choose to leave them as "mysteries" instead of trying to explain them. One thing I will say, however, is that none of them had any real value to my or anyone else's life. And one thing that I have decided is that the only thing worth spending your time cultivating is wisdom. Don't assume that because I'm not a fan of qi, it's because I dismissed it out of hand---.

Yes, but what if someone has studied all the esoteric stuff for decades, have most---if not all---of the experiences that people talk about, and, come to the conclusion that it's "mostly all bosh"? The problem with energetics isn't the experiences that people have, it's the theoretical overlay that has built-up around them.

Exactly!