HEALING AND MARTIAL ARTS BLOG

Tai-chi has a powerful effect on the way our minds work. We are used to using our minds linearly, as you would when reading words in a book, one word after the other. We are trained to use our minds in this way and cannot stop even in our everyday lives.

So when we practice Tai-chi it is very difficult to allow all our joints and muscles to move at the same time. We can only concentrate on one thing, then the next, etc. You may see Tai-chi forms in which the body is held stiffly but the arms and legs move gracefully. This shows the limitation of how many things the student can pay attention to at once.

The goal of Tai-chi practice of course, is to have no such limitations but to allow each part of the body to pay attention to itself, in coordination with all the other joints and muscles. This requires our thinking mind, delegating authority to the body. Yet the thinking mind thinks it is the only thing that can perceive and react to things. It can barely conceive that the body is intelligent.

The Gnostics tell a story of Sofia (representing the seeking for wisdom) trying to find God. During her journey she gave birth to the demiurge (lesser God) and then continued on her journey. The demiurge looked around and realized he was the only one there and thought he was God.

This is a way of saying that the thinking mind is not the King – that each part of the body is a center of intelligence. Tai-chi allows us to achieve this decentralized attention so that we can be better coordinated, healthier and have better relationships with other people.

If our attention is isolated in our heads, as if in a box, then all perception is related to the head. We feel isolated in that box and perceive other people as being boxes. Each of us wants to be a bigger box, or a more powerful, or smarter or braver box. Our identity is related to our isolation.

With decentralized attention, our identity is related to our connections – to other people, to nature, of the mind and the body, etc. We don’t feel opposed to others but connected to them, part of them.

Imagine if everyone in the world had a mind like this. Their very identity would depend on their connection to everyone else and every other living thing. How would the world be different? When a Tai-chi teacher teaches, he or she not only tries to improve his students’ health, but is laying the groundwork for a more peaceful world.

The body requires an even distribution of attention in order to maintain its health. When attention is locked up in the head, the body is starved of the energy of attention. Notice how you feel after finishing a Tai-chi class. Your body feels empowered and connected, relieved of stress. You feel more open to other people and to nature.

You are helping to heal the world every time you take a Tai-chi class or spend time practicing. Remember the principle: “The inside and the outside reflect each other.”

One of the greatest difficulties in learning Tai-chi is that very few people can control their muscles and joints on a fine level. Most people are awkward and are often worried about showing their awkwardness in front of other people. No worries. Everyone else is awkward too.

In order to regain a complete connection between your attention and every muscle and joint of the body, we begin with Chi-gung exercises. In the case of my school, we practice “Zookinesis” (animal exercises). There is no point in learning Tai-chi forms, let alone push hands, if you are not connected to your own body.

The result of this complete connection to your body is that you are able to feel the flow of momentum through your body and can make your movements smooth. You can feel the flow of internal energy (chi) through your body and let go of the ways you block that energy. This results in being able to feel life more intensely and being able to feel more joy.

Then when you practice forms or push hands, you can see how your habits of tension and fear freeze parts of your body so they can’t participate in the exercise. For example in push hands, the pelvis should be relaxed so that it feels like a piece of wood floating in the ocean, bobbing with the waves. The upper body should move with the action of your partner so you don’t resist his actions.

While the hips and upper body work together to neutralize your partner’s pushes, they cannot lock together. Each works in its own way and has its own qualities and yet they also work together. In fact each muscle and joint should be independent and work in its own way and yet all work together for a common goal (of neutralizing and pushing the partner).

If I can get your hips to lock together with the upper body and get your upper body to lock together with your fears and habits, then I can control your movements. So you see that the ultimate goal of push hands is to free you from your fears and habits so that your body and mind can work effortlessly and efficiently.

The result is that each part of your body becomes conscious and can experience joy and your life is much more fulfilling.

“The inside and the outside – they are made of the same flesh”.  This is reportedly the cry a student of Chan (Zen) cried out when he reached enlightenment.  It is an apt description of the basic principle a Tai-chi teacher tries to teach to his students to bring them to their first perceptual breakthrough.

Every discipline of personal development is based on the principle that, to change one’s life, you need to change what is going on within yourself.  What else can we do?  We can’t change the whole world around just to our liking.

And so we learn how perfecting proper body mechanics allows us to perform physical tasks easily.  Learning about the mechanics of our attention (mind) allows us to be effective in interpersonal relationships and in navigating our lives.

As we discover the physical and mental behavior patterns that presently fill us, learn which ones are effective and which interfere with our power in life, we can reconstruct the very mechanisms we use to live our lives.

And then we discover that much of the way we perceive the world around us is really a reflection of the patterns of behavior within us.  As we become more creative in gaining Tai-chi skills, the world itself seems to change and not be as threatening or as cold.

The student discovers that much of what he took to be the cold reality of life was just the projection of a story he was telling himself, onto the world outside.

At this point he realizes that part of that story was his identity.  To really gain power in life, to be able to drop the behavior patterns of battle and self destruction, you have to allow that story about your identity to change.

And then you become just a simple person.  In another Zen story, a Buddhist student brags to his Taoist friend that his Buddhist teacher can create miracles.  “With a movement of his arm he can make an entire dinner appear in the middle of the forest.  He can knock over a band of robbers with one breath.  He can clear a valley of fog with one in-breath.”   The Taoist student was not impressed.  “That’s nothing compared to my teacher,” he said.  “What can your Taoist teacher do?”  The Taoist student replied, “When my teacher is hungry, he eats.  When he is tired, he sleeps.”

To what degree do the stories we have been told, affect our perceptions and our behaviors?  We trust that pieces of paper (money) have great value and then numbers in computer memory have great value and then learn, as we have lately, that there is nothing really backing up that value.  These are stories we tell each other to help our lives run smoother.

But we have all learned what happens when some of us no longer believe those stories.  Perhaps we need to base our lives on stories that are not “built on shifting sands”. 

In the novel, The Doubting Snake, I suggest this battle of stories is the basis for the underlying drama of our times and that those who become the new story tellers, can lead us into more meaningful lives.

But we must begin by understanding the stories that we have based our lives on.  To what degree is health, loving relationships, and a feeling of connection to the earth important in our lives?  And to what degree does the quest for money overshadow these values?

If you tell yourself a new story, a healthy one, that story may resonate with others and become their story.  The power of life is to be the story teller and not just the actor portraying someone else’s story.

Transform the inside to transform the outside. This is what every Tai-chi student must realize at deeper and deeper levels.

If we could only understand how our memory works, we could access deep memories, even those before birth.  The study of Zookinesis and Tai-chi explains the mechanics of memory and teaches us how to access these deep memories.  Natural memory, or what is called, “sacred memory” is the biological way memories are stored.  It is the memory of feeling states, which includes how your body feels, skills you have acquired, and how your interaction with the world around you, changes your internal state. 

This type of memory is not related to time but to maintaining an optimal internal state of health, and an optimal connection to your natural environment.  You do not lay down memories in a time-line.  Rather, this type of memory is cyclic, sometimes moving away from optimal condition and sometimes returning to it. 

At a certain point in life, you learn about time and your life begins to revolve around time.  You are taught to lay down memories using time as a reference.  Time, rather than health, is the reference point of a memory.  You dissociate yourself from inner feeling and the feeling of health so that you can become part of the “time culture” we have invented.  Your behavior no longer binds you to health but to time. 

Furthermore the type of time we use as the basis of our culture is separated from the vagaries of nature.  Rather than judging time by the flowering of a certain type of plant or the appearance of a certain insect, we use clock time to eliminate any variations.  This allows the world around us to appear mechanistic and our lives to become mechanistic. 

Taoist teaching teaches us to experience every moment of our lives with our whole selves.  Even when a thought comes to us, we not only experience that thought as words, but as internal feelings.  Thoughts become complexes of feelings and associations with a short label of words.  The words are not the thoughts.  The feelings and experiences are the thoughts. 

In this way every aspect of life stirs the body, stirs the emotions, and stirs our connection to nature.  Life is more vivid, intense and beautiful.  It is much easier to access the earliest memories because those complexes of feelings are still present.

When we learn a Tai-chi form, for example, we are concentrating on the feeling of our body’s alignment at each moment.  The teacher adjusts our body so that we can feel proper alignment in that pose and feel how energy flows so much more freely when we are aligned. 

We concentrate on how each muscle must become alive and have an eagerness to move.  At first, the eagerness of the muscle is to remain tight.  We learn how to convince the muscle to relax.  When the muscle feels the joy of relaxation and its increased competence, it becomes eager to relax and move.  We remember the process of developing eagerness in that muscle and apply the same process to other muscles.  In this way, memory can be transferred from one muscle to the other. 

Each muscle “remembers” how it can interact with other muscles to create the proper flow of movement for the Tai-chi form or Zookinesis exercise.  The memories of each muscle interact with the memories of the others, as if they were people sitting around talking about “the old times”. 

Those memories of interaction then interact with your creativity so that the muscles can play with their relationships with each other.  Using the memory of how they learned to cooperate with each other as a basis, the muscles are also affected by your memory of an eagle flying, or perhaps, a tiger pouncing.  The muscles blend their memories of cooperation with the other muscles with the memory of the eagle flying and create a composite.  This is how animal forms are developed.  Each is based on proper body mechanics for a human yet influenced by the movements of an animal.

This is an example of how we re-ignite the internal dynamics of memory that were the norm before we learned about clock time.  We learn to operate with both modes of memory and not sacrifice “sacred memory” for “clock memory”.  Sacred memory allows you to live in eternity within each second of clock time.  You have access to the memory of your whole body and spirit, and their connection to all of nature.  Yet you can still show up to an appointment “on time”.

The healing principles of Tai-chi identify habits as one of the most destructive forces leading to the deterioration of the body.  These principles explain the underlying cause of those habits and how to resolve them.  We all know that drug habits and eating disorders are destructive but there are more fundamental levels of behavior that we are only dimly aware of.

One of my students recently realized that an old behavior as a child permanently shaped how he uses his attention.  He has a “lazy eye” and had to concentrate in a certain way in order to make the images in his eyes, while reading, merge into one image. This extreme focusing of attention became permanent and required a great deal of energy.  As an adult he forgot about what he had done because it just became part of who he is.  The behavior threw the mechanics of his body way off.

When beginning Tai-chi students practice “Push Hands” they tighten up their bodies and raise their centers of gravity, the exact opposite of what is required.  In this exercise each partner tries to push the other one over.  Push Hands requires a loose body and low center of gravity so that you can’t be pushed and so that your own push emanates from the ground and shoots out like a whip.

The students soon realize that they bring their energy and attention up because their eyes are at the top of their bodies.  They feel their force needs to emanate out of where they’re looking from.  This habit is subconscious until the practice of Push Hands reveals it. 

We have many ridiculous habits formed during childhood, which make no mechanical sense.  Or, the habits make sense only for limited uses but become permanent and are used all the time. 

As a teacher, I am amazed by the habits my students discover as they practice Tai-chi.  By cleaning out those habits we release tremendous amounts of trapped energy and can feel much more relaxed and happy.  We also can avoid the subconscious habits building into even more destructive habits such as drug abuse. 

The difficulty in letting go of habits is that, to a large extent, we identify ourselves as our habits.  These can be habits of movement, of thinking and of emotion.  The habits become an image of us, rather than our true, free, creative selves.  We tend to solidify our habits and defend them because we feel we are defending ourselves.  Even the groups we belong to such as political parties may be a reflection of our ingrained habits. 

This jams up our creativity, our thinking ability, tightens the body and sanctifies patterns of behavior which were created during childhood, when we really didn’t understand much.  The result can be a whole society based on patterns of behavior created during childhood and institutionally maintained. 

The greatest political power any individual can have is, as the Beatles said, “Free your mind instead”.  Examine the fundamental habits of your life and allow your creative spirit to heal you.  Tai-chi and Zookinesis practice was specifically designed for this purpose.

Your body does not need to degenerate as you get older.  In fact, it can continue to get stronger, more flexible and more agile throughout life. The exercise systems of Tai-chi and Zookinesis explain how to keep the body young and avoid aging altogether.

According to Chinese medicine, all the cells and organs of the body communicate with each other through a system of biological energy called, “chi”.  They know how to regulate their activities according to the activities of the other cells and organs.  This system of chi is not isolated within the body alone, but is connected to this same energy that serves as the basis of life throughout the earth.  In this way each cell and organ is aware of the environmental conditions in the area and can adjust its activities according to changes in weather and time of year.  In this way the body can stay in the optimum internal condition for health. 

The loss of flexibility is another factor associated with aging.  Connective tissue (fascia) surrounds each organ, bone, muscle and the body cavities.  It provides an interconnected, flexible web that allows the body to act in a rubbery manner.  Its looseness, for example, allows the rib cage to expand when you breathe in.  If the connective tissue were to lose its elasticity your breathing would become shallow.  This would result in a poorer exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen and the cells would be oxygen deprived.

Tighter connective tissue interferes with joint mobility so that your movements become stiff.  The proper flow of blood and lymph requires movement of the body.  When the body can’t move properly, the blood and lymph cannot do as good a job at getting rid of body wastes such as lactic acid and carbon dioxide.  The body remains constantly filled with waste.

Aging is also the gradual dissociation of the mind and body.  As children we relish in movement and using energy.  As we get older we move less and think more.  Our thinking is not connected with movement (as described in previous articles) and so becomes a world within itself.  Gradually we “live” more and more in our thinking and not in our bodies. 

The thinking mind becomes the center of the flow of energy and the body is deprived of energy, creating an unbalanced situation.  According to Chinese medicine, both an excess and a depletion of energy is harmful.  Too much chi burns the mind out.  Too little chi allows the body to deteriorate. 

Yet if we live in our minds we have no sense of perspective about the balance of energy.  Most people cannot even feel chi let alone know how to balance this energy.  This is why Zookinesis explains that consciousness itself is another type of energy, which also has dynamics and qualities and which needs to be balanced as well.  Only by becoming aware of the dynamics of consciousness (or what I call the “dynamics of attention”) can we ever hope to affect the balance of chi.

Consciousness (attention) is what makes us aware.  The unique perspective of Zookinesis is that consciousness is not isolated within the body.  It is a universal energy, much like gravity that pervades all things.  As it flows through each of us, this energy takes on its unique flavor.  The physical stiffness of the body tends to distort the flow of attention and created the imbalance of attention.  The exercises reveal this relationship between the tightness of the body and the imbalance of attention so that it becomes obvious. 

We can then notice how, with each relaxation of the body, the attention becomes more balanced and more connected to the body.

The result is a complete integration, not only of your attention with your body, but of your attention with the greater flow of consciousness of the world around you.  You feel less isolated.  You also feel less vulnerable because you now can see this interconnection and can understand how to strengthen yourself and prevent the deterioration of your mind and body.

You can also understand how these factors of deterioration affect other people and cause their behavior patterns.  This allows you to be more empathetic to them.  A student recently asked me how I can stand to live in this world when I see the destructive behaviors of other people.  When you see things from a healer’s perspective, all the anomalies you see are an education.  They are not aggravating but are just interesting and educational. Yet, I do feel sad, knowing that healing is so easily available yet so many people will live their lives in misery.

In both Tai-chi and Zookinesis, it is essential to understand and to feel how the connection of your consciousness to the general flow of consciousness around you is essential to prevent aging.  It is so easy to see the bad things of the world and to withdraw, not wanting to be connected to this world.  You then feel as if it’s you against the world.

The clear flow of consciousness and chi through your body is essential to prevent aging and to keep healthy.  The exercise of Push Hands allows you to practice extending your energies into another person and to allow theirs in.  It is set up as a battle, each trying to push the other over, so that it duplicates what you perceive as your life situation.  You are battling against the world.  Yet you learn in Push Hands, to connect the flow of force of the opponent (or partner) into the flow of forces within you so as to end the feeling of battle.  If you stiffen up against him, he will easily push you over.  If you absorb his force, combine it with your own and flow back towards him, you become more effective.

You learn that by ending the feeling of battle you become effective.  Your strength lies in allowing yourself to connect with the rest of the world.  You can then enjoy life.

The world will still be the same crazy place it was but you can see the mechanisms behind the behavior of people and cultures and not get trapped in them.  Instead of identifying with a particular world culture you identify with the long line of people throughout history who were aware of these mechanisms.  They were able to free themselves from the destructive habit patterns of the people around them. 

Imagine yourself in a smelly, mucky swamp.  You curse having to walk through this mess and concentrate on the smell and the muck.  Soon you discover beautiful birds and insects.  You feel the warm breeze and smell some flowers.  Your attention is gradually drawn to the beauty of the swamp until even the smell and the muck seem an integral part of that beauty.  You then enjoy being part of this scene.

In the same way, the world we live in is, to a large extent, the result of what we pay attention to.  The news on television calls your attention mostly to the negative and horrifying part of our society.  Yet the Public Broadcasting programs call your attention to the beauty.  How do you feel after watching the news?  How do you feel after watching  nature programs?  What factors in our society direct your attention to its horror? 

The question of aging really is about your power to remain young and healthy.  Having control over what you pay attention to is vital to prevent aging.  This does not mean that you become oblivious to the problems of our world but that those problems don’t destroy you.  You must regain control over the dynamics of your attention and the balance of energy.  This is where you start in Tai-chi and Zookinesis.

I know that in modern times Tai-chi has become just memorizing a series of movements and Push Hands has just become a shoving contest.  This is true even in China itself.  But the movements and the pushing are just the surface level of a very deep and beautiful teaching.  The teaching of “immortality”, as it used to be called, is about how to stay young and healthy and thereby actually extend your lifespan. It teaches you how to become connected to the world around you so that your consciousness may remain connected to the world even after your body dies.

Don’t give in to the images of aging.  Don’t let those images implant themselves within you and direct your consciousness.  Instead look to the agility, strength and beauty of wild animals and of athletes and allow those images to direct your consciousness. 

I teach seated Zookinesis exercises to a local senior community.  When I began six years ago, they could barely move.  Now we are beginning to do seated acrobatic movements.  Each time I show them what exercise we are working towards, they laugh, feeling they could never do that.  Yet a month or two later, they easily do the exercise.  Most of them are over 90 years old.  I think Zookinesis has given them a new perspective of what they are capable of.  They are now headed in a positive direction – stronger, more flexible, more relaxed and more connected to their bodies.  When you live your life in this positive direction, you are already immortal.

We understand that play is a natural behavior of many animals.  Puppies and kittens understand that they aren’t really trying to kill each other.  They understand make-believe.  They also understand reality as when a large animal runs after them, growling loudly.  Play is not to be taken literally but is good practice for reality.

Play teaches you to perceive clearly and for your body to react quickly.  It develops a lively connection of attention to the body.

Our civilization uses this understanding to trick us.  It uses play, not to develop a connection of attention to the actions of the body, but to words.  As we become more and more lethargic, ideas replace the body as the arena of action.  We live in the world of ideas.  This changes the role of the body, and by extension, the whole physical world in our creative process.  Lately the new close relationship between our play, or creativity, and words, our thinking process, has changed.  The role of the body and then words is being replaced by machinery.  When you watch children play video games, to what is their attention connected?  It is hardly connected to the body or even to ideas.  It is connected to computer screen images.

This slow progression heads in one direction – to disconnect attention from the body and the physical world and to connect it to factors than can be manipulated by other people. It is hard to manipulate someone’s body.  It is easier to manipulate their ideas.  But if their attention is connected to machinery, you can control the programming even more easily.

The advertiser’s job is to move people’s attention in the direction of more manipulation.  The teacher’s job is to move the attention back to ideas and to the physical world. 

When you manipulate symbols – a national flag for example – you are trying to control peoples’ behavior.  In most cases this manipulation is not for the benefit of that person.  It is for the benefit of the manipulator. 

There are many human histories.  There is the history of wars and politics.  There is the history of the condition of the average person.  There are labor and social movements.  Histories of religion, philosophy, arts and science fill university curriculums.  But really, they are all the history of the attempted manipulation of attention to control behavior. 

It is the history of storytelling – the story of who we are, where we came from and why we are here.  If we feel we belong to one group that is opposed to another group, we have conflict. People can be made to fight other people because of the story of who they are and where they came from. 

Zookinesis teaches us how our attention becomes controlled by the stories we are told.  It teaches us to understand the dynamics of attention itself so that we can notice when and how it is being controlled and regain that control.

In order to do this it is important to understand what attention is and its relationship to the body and the physical world in general.

Zookinesis considers that what makes each person an individual is the way our creativity “plays” with the energy of attention.  It is similar to the way we “play” with the energy of gravity in the way we move.  Attention is the consciousness behind the eyes and ears.  It is that which is aware of thoughts and emotions. 

There are two forces controlling attention.  One is the various distractions that we encounter every day.  They mold our attention into their shape.  The other force is creativity which is the playfulness that makes each of us unique and is part of our biological heritage.  Any individual may be more influenced by the distractions or more by creativity. 

People with OCD (obsessive, compulsive disorder) are almost completely controlled by their environment.  They are drawn to the strongest distraction at each moment.  People who are completely controlled by their creativity we may call “airheads”.  They are hardly connected to the world around them but only to their ideas and fantasies. 

The job of a parent or teacher is to balance these two forces in the child or student.  The point of balance between these two forces is called “the gate” in Zookinesis.  The goal of the training is to become “the gatekeeper”, that is, to be fully aware of and control the balance of environmental influences and playful creativity on the flow of attention.

The role of a teaching, such as Zookinesis or Tai-chi, is to provide the student with the skills to maintain that balance.  To what degree do you allow yourself to be molded by the influences around you and to what degree do you step outside of those influences and “create your own story”?

At the advanced level of any teaching, the student begins to perceive “who” it is that is learning, controlling this balance and creating the story.  Religious people would call this “union with God”, meaning that you perceive the source of your own creativity.  You understand your uniqueness and yet your complete connection to all other people and forms of life. 

You cannot do this by handing over your attention to any particular dogma, whether a philosophy, religion or any teaching.  You can use these vehicles to develop the balance of external influences and creative influences on your attention, but you do not allow them to fully mold your perspective.  There are many vehicles on the road but in the end you need to step out of the vehicle and get to your destination.

Ancient religions and other teaching were based on “the elements”.  This was an early form of psychology.  You became aware of the influences of your body, your thinking mind, your will and your emotions and the balance of these factors in each moment of your life.  Your goal was to keep the “elements” in balance. 

The result was that you became aware of the fifth element – “spirit”.  Spirit was the force that connected all life together, or what we would call “chi” in Taoist philosophy.  When you achieved the balance of the first four elements it would be as if you were standing in the middle of a spiral staircase and could look all the way up and down the stairs. Spirit is all the activity that you see going on.  Each level is a level of life or consciousness.  Your next goal in these teachings, was to explore all the floors.  The final step of training was to be aware of all the levels of consciousness at the same time so that you are a fully conscious being. 

This is the basis of Zookinesis training.  You first become aware of the dynamics of your physical body.  In order to do this you have to allow your attention to connect to all parts of your body.  This requires working on the flow of attention and letting go of any blockage to that attention.  You gradually become aware of that part of you that directs the flow of attention (creativity). 

Now when you practice the exercises, you are not just shoving your body parts around.  You are lightly manipulating the flow of attention in your body and that, in turn, affects the movements.  Your efforts and movements become lighter and lighter and yet more effective and powerful. 

Through physical exercises, Zookinesis achieves a “spiritual” end, that of true self awareness.  You can then examine the “play” of your life to determine in which ways that play is positive or negative.  You can create a different play or story for yourself, one which is more healing for you and for others.

It all starts with realizing that consciousness itself is a force that connects you to the rest of nature.  It flows through your physical body and animates it. Chi is the biological activity that results.  Creativity is the way we play and is a natural behavior of many species.  We humans “play” with our attention and create stories.  We then build our civilizations on the foundation of those stories.

The physical and mental structures we build seem so solid and everlasting that we forget the “play” behind them.  When play, or creativity is no longer a part of each “element” of our lives, then we become deadened and our physical, mental and emotional health suffer.  Our “will” gets out of balance and we get angry when we don’t get our way. 

That is why I like public broadcasting programs so much.  They explain how creative people and cultures changed their world and their ideas.  They show how our own present situation is the result of this flow of the history of creativity.  Then we can take our part in that history and ask ourselves how we can become more creative.  We realize that rather than being just a member of a race, religion or nationality, we are a member of the creative force of life.

During the winter months, I take the goldfish from my outdoor pond and bring them to a large fish tank in the basement.  I didn’t dig the pond deep enough to be able to leave them out over the winter.  As I watch them swim around I wonder if they are aware of the medium of water they are swimming in.  The water supports them, protects them and allows them to move.

We are also moving within a dense medium – air.  While we can’t see it, the pressure of the air around us is over fifteen pounds per square inch.  Several miles of air above us press down on the air around us, making the air at sea level very dense.

Yet we are not usually aware of air unless it is a windy day.  Then we can feel the air on our skins and can see dead leaves and trash flying around.  We are aware of the effects of air even if we are not directly aware of the air itself. 

Without an atmosphere life could not exist.  Without water, fish would suffocate, dry out and die.  There is another medium which is equally as vital to life as air and water and equally as hard to see.  This is the medium of consciousness.  While most people can’t perceive consciousness directly we can see its effects.  In fact, everything we are aware of is the effect of the medium of consciousness. 

I am writing this subject as this week’s lessons for an important reason.  Many people have told me that they are seeking spiritual development or self awareness or some kind of inner training.   There is a tendency in modern times to think that there is some trick or secret to be learned that will immediately lead to enlightenment or spiritual awareness.  So they repeat phrases to themselves or listen to motivational speakers repeat various clichés.  If they only hear the right phrase or repeat the right magical spell, they will be transformed. 

My take on this is that any kind of training must begin with the awareness of the medium you exist in, the mechanism that you are as a human being and how this mechanism has been designed to work in the medium.  Fish have fins so that they can swim in water.  They are not just decorations someone placed on them.  Animals have muscles and bones so they can use leverage to work with the force of gravity, which is another medium.  Reptiles developed a thick scaled skin to avoid drying out in the medium of air.

We can understand how our bodies have evolved to work within various mediums.  To understand our minds, emotions and other inner aspects of being human, we need to understand the other mediums in which we exist. 

We can know consciousness by the dynamics of our attention.  I have discussed this in other lessons.  I believe that there is no secret phrase or idea we can think about that will lead to a significant transformation of our lives.  But awareness of how our minds, emotions and other “inner” parts are designed to work in the medium of consciousness can’t help but to restore our full potential and vitality.

One of the Chinese Zen (Chan) masters witnessed a group of Buddhists arguing about a waving flag.  Some of the Buddhists said that the flag was waving.  Others said that it was actually the wind that was waving.  The Zen master told them that it was their minds that were waving. 

The wind and the flag show how you can perceive an invisible force by watching a visible objects reaction to that force.  The force was the movement of the air.  In the same way the movement of the flag created an effect on the minds of the Buddhists.  The thinking mind and the consciousness are in the same relationship as the flag and the wind. 

If you were to see a flag moving but didn’t know about the wind you would wonder, “Why is the flag moving?”  In the same way, my first koan (Zen question) as a child was, “Why does one thought follow another in a particular pattern?”  To understand this you need to understand the relationship between thinking and consciousness.  They are not the same. 

The movement of consciousness does not necessarily have to result in thinking.  It can lead to the movement of chi (internal energy).  It is said that consciousness leads, the internal energy follows and the body then follows that.  The saying actually is translated as “mind leads” but this mind does not mean thinking.  It refers to attention itself.  I use the term “attention” very often in my writings instead of “consciousness”.

Our attention is often ripped and pulled this way and that by the influences around us, like the wind waving the flag.  When we are seeking spiritual development, or whatever glorious phrase is used, we are usually trying to bring our attention more under our creative control.  We want our creativity to be more of an influence over our attention than the external forces such as advertisers or peer pressure. 

So spiritual development is really about perfecting the relationship of creativity and attention.  In Taoist philosophy creativity is referred to as the “Yang” force and attention as the “Yin” force.  Creativity is active; it is the shaper.  Attention is passive; it is the substance, the medium that is shaped.

What we are trying to discover in our training, is: to what extent is what we perceive a result of what is actually there and to what extent is it a result of how our attention is shaped and affected by the forces around us.  We are trying to get a clear picture of our lives and the world around us. 

Telescopes are placed high on mountaintops because the atmosphere interferes with the light coming into the telescopes.  This light is distorted by the miles of compacted air which is usually in a state of turbulence.  The higher up you go, the less air and the less distortion.

That is why silent meditation is part of any spiritual practice.  The thinking mind is like the miles of air.  It is usually in a state of movement which distorts your perception of the world around you. The key is to see things as they really are.

Then you can work on your forms, your push hands or, in other systems, on your rituals and really know what you are doing.  You can do your healing such as Tai-chi Massage and really see the problems within your patient about how his creativity and attention interact and how that interaction affects the body.  When these factors become clearly visible, then you can easily see how to use the techniques you have learned to correct those problems. 

There is another saying that if you put a frog into hot water it will jump out.  But if you put it into room temperature water then slowly heat the water up, the frog will not notice the slow increase and will eventually get boiled.  We are in a similar situation.  We cannot see how the influences around us control our thinking minds, how this affects or interferes with the dynamics of our attention and how that degrades the body.  Our whole system gradually degrades until we are in a sorry mess.  The solution is to become aware of this whole process.

One of the reasons I love Tai-chi and Zookinesis so much is that it so clearly explains this whole process and gives you a clearly defined, step by step process to use for your training.  There is no mysteriousness.  Yet there is an appreciation for the process and an awe of the process.  It is similar to a car fanatic who loves his cars and knows every detail about how they work.  He will spend an enormous amount of time repairing and improving his cars while people like me would rather just send it to a mechanic and only if it really needs fixing.

This winter solstice is unusual.  It is also the time of the new moon.  The mythological significance of this is that now we look forward to both an ever increasing length of day and an ever increasing brightness of the moon.  This is considered to be the best time to work on any practice that gives you greater awareness (light).  That is the way ancient people understood things.  Our inner world should be in harmony with the dynamics of nature around us.  If we can see, understand and predict the patterns of nature, we will then know when to plant, when to harvest, etc.

If we can see and understand the forces “inside” of us, then our training will be more effective.  Rather than just making the mind more “windy” by repeating clichés to ourselves or trying to discover the “correct” ideas, we can quiet down the wind and perceive our basic nature and how our nature is designed to work in the medium of consciousness.

The ability of fear to control behavior is an impediment to developing the full power of your attention.  As you develop the sensitivity of your attention you will notice many things that you were too dull to notice before, such as the flow of energy in the world around you.  This new awareness may trigger fear because it is an unexpected perception.  You may turn that perception into something familiar in order to make it more comfortable to you.  If you experience energy around another person, you may turn it into seeing a color around the person and call it an aura, for example.  You may not be ready to experience the energy directly as such. 

Most of what we experience through our senses is our own interpretation.  When we experience sight, for example, we are experiencing two tiny spots of light, one in each retina.  The impression of experiencing a large scene in front of us, filled with very solid objects is our interpretation of those spots of light, based on prior experience.  This keeps us rooted into experiencing what we expect to experience (what I call the “Echo of Expectation”). 

With a practice such as Zookinesis or Tai-chi you must allow yourself new experiences.  As you experience new things, such as the flow of energy (chi) you may be uncomfortable because you are in “new territory”. 

When a student tells me that he is afraid to experience these new things I tell him this:

First of all you are not afraid.  By saying you are afraid you are saying that what you are, is fear.  You are identifying yourself as fear.  “I am afraid” rather than “I am Joe”.  The truth is that you are perceiving or experiencing fear, but you are not that fear.  So you are experiencing fear and the new experience that you believed caused that fear.  You tell yourself a story.  “I must not feel fear.  If experiencing chi causes me to experience fear then I must not experience chi.”

You emphasize the importance of not experiencing things.  In Zookinesis and Tai-chi we emphasize experiencing things in as much detail and clarity as possible.  So you can experience the chi and experience the fear as well.  Don’t push the fear away.  Pay attention to it.  How does it feel in your chest, in your back, in your arms, etc.  Get to know the feeling of fear.  At the same time, get to know the feeling of chi.  It is all right to experience two things at once.

Emphasize getting to know your experiences and realize that you are not those experiences.  You are that which experiences.  Fear is just another experience.  It may make sense to avoid dangerous situations but that is not the same thing as avoiding a situation because you experience fear.  The feeling of fear may suggest to you that there is a danger, but then look at that danger and decide for yourself whether the danger is real.

If you are afraid of trying something new because you may fail, for example, you know very well that that is silly.  Yet the feeling of fear keeps you trapped.  In this case, get to know the feeling of fear and know that you are not the fear.  The more clearly you see the fear the more you know it is not you. 

From then on fear will serve to warn you of possible danger but it will not trap your behavior.  It will help you rather than hinder you.