What is Chi?

[Kai]

In Chapter two, Frantzis first gives some physiological "reasons" for the benefits of Chi Gung. Some are plausable (the exercising of vascular smooth muscle, efficient movement of lymph, tendon and muscle elasticity) but others I don't know what to make of (cerebralspinal fluid "pump"? Bone marrow "energized"? Body cells "healed"?). Even if frantzis is wrong on only some accounts then by default he is onto something on others. I'm willing to spend the time investigating.

He then proceeds into the process of awakening Chi. "Muscles that were initially numb will begin to regain sensation. Your body will reveal itself to you gradually...as your body becomes more alive you will be able to feel how your physical self works from the inside out." Now, if that doesn't sound like psychosomatics, I don't know what does. Frantzis goes on to say this process is irregular, with starts and stops, a sort of two steps forward one step back kind of process. "One week one part of your body will open [you become more aware and psychosomatically connected to that part], while a previously open part closes again...the time will come...when your body will open up and stay open, completely accessible to your awareness." He also warns that you should never force this process, that "your chi is growing whether you are [consciously] aware of it or not, and that strange sensations of pressure, warmth, tingling or "electricity", expansion, contraction, or "wind or water movement" (most of which I would guess come from vascular related happenings). It may also cause the release of emotions (remember, it's psychosomatic /and/ somatopsychic, the connection goes both ways).

The last section of this chapter discusses that in specific, that is, the Taoist approach to emotional release rather than the western or Kundalini approach. The latter types focus on catharsis, either in stages or all at once (think of the screaming, yelling, punch a pillow, act it out types of emotional outbursts that are often suggested). The Taoist approach is to "dissolve emotions", by which he means "allowing emotional energy to move through your system until it completes itself'; there is no attempt to push the energy out or to prevent it from occupying in the first place." Now, where have we heard something like this before? Oh right, ANGEL TECH! In the discussion on excitement and resistance, AA suggests "blending with it. For further instructions, don't hold your breath." I think what they both mean is, emotional or second circuit stuff is something that should be worked through constantly, not holed up until it is released in stages or all at once. A constant working through, or "dissolving", of emotional energy is more healthy in his view (and mine as well, from experience).

And of course, the caveat: that he is not a doctor and that Chi Gung does not replace psychotherapy or medical advice, and that all techniques should be taken with caution. "Until the nerves [psychosomatic connections]  have been developed, the will [conscious effort] must be used to transmit messages, much as a baby at first has to use tremendous will power to crawl and walk untill the appropriate nerve ways between the brain and the chi [or in my words, the appropriate psychosomatic connections] are forged. Once those links are in place, you do not have to think about walking, you simply walk." This shows that Chi Gung is in Frantzis' mind an activity integrated into the rest of one's life until it becomes unconcious and habit.

Feeling a bit tired right now. Chapter three when I have time.

[Cramulus]

encoding the whole thing into a document is going to be a lot of work -- but many hands can do it more easily

I've pasted the first page of this thread onto my sandbox wiki --- feel free to paste more on there, it'll make it easier for [whoever does it] to make it into a sexy pdf

http://principiadiscordia.com/cramulus/index.php?title=What_is_Chi%3F

[Kai]

I think there is only a problem with such a publication if it is not remembered that this thread continues to be a work in progress and as such is nowhere near complete.

I just keep writing whenever something occurs to me, or when I hear of some particular matter in conversation.



Also, I apologize if my writing sounds weird at times. I've been reading Darwin's Autobiography recently, and I'm rather tuned into his style (or lack thereof, some may say) at the moment.

[LMNO]

I like how you parse his writing into "possible physical effects," "possible mental effects,"and "could be a metaphor for something else" (my phrases).  When you do that, you can see that the physical actions can result in mental changes, which are usually described in metaphorical ways.

This makes it harder to dismiss the whole thing as bullshit, which is good.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I don't know if we've ever had a thread about this on here, but I thought I might bring it up because of the very different filters that other people have around here, different perspectives and different ideas.

So what is Chi? Is it actual manipulation of internal energy? Is it some sort of psychosomatic effect? Something is going on when I visualize chi manipulation and while I'm going with psychosomatic right now, I would like to hear other peoples opinions about it. There also seems to be some deep health benefits of the sustained practice of Chi Gung, what is that from? I hear stories about older people, well into their 70s, who were once in poor health and after several months of chi gung practice have recovered from intense arthritis, and so on.

I never took a decent statistics class.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Some are plausable (the exercising of vascular smooth muscle

Two things:

• Is there even the slightest hint that smooth muscle needs to be "exercised"?
• Wouldn't a cold shower (or smoking a cigarette) work much better?

[Kai]

Okay, this is chapter three now, on Chi Gung Theory.

And this one comes with a huge WARNING from me. The author is from the west, his first language is English and he's attempting to transmit a thousand year old system from Chinese into English, from which I am attempting to understand as part psychosomatics and part metaphor and translate from that version to what you see here. In other words, this is going through many reality filters, and just like a game of telephone I have no idea if this is going to come out interesting or as gibberish. Good? Good.

Frantzis begins by explaining that the way Chi Gung has been popularized in the west is largely that of superficial imitation of movements and visualizations. He says that the contents of this book actually encompass a system known as nei gung (lit: internal power or work), which focuses on "developing the core energy that travels through the center of the body, and from the core, opening and energizing the peripheral energy lines" whereas Chi Gung worked in the opposite direction. Now, this sounds really bogus right there, because I don't quite know what any of that could be if taken as metaphor. However, he goes on to say "In chi gung, the practictioner works one chi technique at a time, combining them gradually into a single sequence....from a medical perspective, Chi Gung uses specific techniques for specific problems, while nei gung energizes the whole system." This I can work with. I remember my T'ai Chi Chu'an instructor talking about the difference between chi (whole body "energy) and li (localized body "energy"). He demonstrated by taking a fist and throwing it out before him, just simply bending the arm at the shoulder and elbow, a movement with very little power behind it. Then he showed that with very little motion, turning his whole body in unison, the fist was thrown with great strength.

This, I think, is the difference Frantzis is talking about. While the western popularization of chi gung focuses on surface movements in sequence and in localized parts of the body (li), whereas nei gung focuses on doing these motions and visualizations in tandam and in the whole body (chi). As my instructor would say, movement from the core out rather from the out, in.

He now says some things about breath.  "The physical breath and the subtle breath [the flow of chi, or psychosomatics] can be coordinated...nei gung can work directly with the subtle breath only without depending upon the intermediary of the physical breath." While breath can be used to coordinate the mind with body, that connection is independent of the breath. Or that's what I'm taking him to say, in my own words. "The practitioner slowly over time becomes sensitive to how the subtle breath or chi is not only penetrating the physical body [1C], but also the more subtle energy bodies [other circuits] -- the emotional body [2C], the mental body [3C]....Once the connection between the mind and the verious chi bodies has been stabilized, one will be aware of how the coordination of the breath with physical and chi movement affects all levels of one's being."

After a short section on relationship of Chi Gung to the other chinese martial arts of T'ai Chi, Hsing-I and Ba Gua, Frantzis goes into the three levels of Chi Gung: body, Chi, and Mind, and how they should relate to each other synergistically (and I know, LMNO, I cringed too). "Simply put, synergy in the core exercises involves coordinating the nany elements of body mind and energy [Chi] so they move simultaneously....Using the parts synergistically would be like multiplying the energy value of the parts, rather than just adding them..." Which goes back to what I said above about chi and li. I interpret his term "core reserves of energy" as being related to overall health, physical, psychological and psychosomatic, with the purpose being increased vibrancy and longevity. He says that this is critical, that most people deplete their core reserves with long term stresses so that they are not available in times of emergency. "The purpose of these core exercises...is a direct investment investment in the future, just as small daily investments of money when it is compounded can lead to large sums down the road." This is a long term thing, not a method of instantaneous gratification. Fair enough.

I'll write up the rest of the chapter later today.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

                                      /
                     ChiiiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIII?

[Kai]

Okay, so this is where it gets far more difficult for me to extract meaning from this chapter.

From the three levels, Frantzis goes into what he calls the "fundamental principle: Heaven [tien], Earth [di], and Man [Ren]". "energy from the Earth is drawn upward from the practitioner's root; the root being slightly below the spot where the feet touch the earth. Energy descends from Heaven through the crown of the head. We are in the middle, and need to recieve energy from both of these sources...when the [two] are connected, the life current can flow naturally." This all seems very weird and useless, but, I think I can work with it.

If we go back to the previous metaphor of mind/chi/body, we can psychosomatic language to this section as well. The core of chi gung, Frantizis goes on, is standing, particularly standing with proper physical alignment of parts. As we'll see later, this alignment is simply the most natural, comfortable way to stand, nothing esoteric to it. He says, "If the body parts are not properly aligned, energy will leak out or dam up [the psychosomatic connection will be diminished]...Most of these places....are in and around the joints."

The first stage is said to be "bringing energy from heaven through the body and down to the earth". I'll stop using his language and start using my own here. From what he says, heaven to earth is closely aligned with 1st circuit, the physical body, which makes perfect sense under all the metaphors we are using, especially when you consider "before energy is sent through specific circuits, the body's capacity to withstand the increased current must be developed." That sounds like a short circuit to me. He also notes that "many people temporarily experience involuntary shaking when standing. This this shaking is symptomatic of bound [1C] energy".

The second stage is the ascending current, "from below the ground to above the head, or from earth to heaven". This is the 2nd circuit primer, and he notes that people short circuit and have "spiritual experiences" from this, and that a want for that sort of experience is a trap in practice. The overall purpose is to have both "currents" "flowing evenly, powerfully and naturally", and that "the sense of well-being and clarity that comes when energy is flowing smoothly does not have the incredible power surges and larger than life quality to it that many imagine. It is, rather, just a very natural ease and connectedness to oneself...When the shoe truly fits the foot, the shoe is forgotten, and one just walks, easily and comfortably."

The last thing to note in this chapter is that the author suggests that for every 2 units of time one practices the ascending current, 8 units of time are spent practicing the descending current, a 1:4 ratio. He says this will prevent burnout [2C short circuit?]. He also says that practicing the different parts of the book out of sequence is either a waste of time, or possibly dangerous to one's health, because the body/chi/mind takes time to assimilate information. In Angel Tech parlance, this practice is an exercise of increasing intelligence, the ability to absorb, INTEGRATE, and communicate information and/or energy, and it takes time to integrate.

I'll be skipping chapter 4, which is on crosstraining with other exercises, and moving straight to 5, which is on breathing.

[Kai]

Today I was listening to a radio show on acupuncture and alternative medicine while driving home from my girlfriend's place. I've caught this show several times before, and while it can sometimes make me cringe, it also can be interesting. I bring it up because today the first topic of business was the title of this thread.

Now, I've been going with Chi as a metaphor for psyche-soma interaction, instead of the literal "currents of energy" definition that the host and most other people would give you. Despite this, she had the right idea about mind and thoughts affecting the wellbeing of the somatic and autonomic nervous systems (the body), and vice versus.

However, the very interesting thing was when she brought environment into the discussion, as yet another layer of effect upon the soma-psyche. I had not yet considered what would traditionally be called Feng Shui since it's so full of bullshit (so much more than Chi Gung) as far as the methods, but there was a kernal of truth there, of environment affecting the psyche-soma.


A question, then: What would feng shui look like if it wasn't full of so much bullshit about mirrors and "wealth corner" and compasses and whatnot? Home decorating?

[Cain]

If you stripped Feng Shui of its mystical trappings, it would pretty much be culturally bound interior design.  I mean, personally, I favour the Scandanavian open plan style to the traditional Chinese look (though occasionally it can be pulled off in a way I not only appreciate, but is very pleasing to the eye), so really it is a matter of aesthetic inclination and what makes someone feel comfortable, relaxed and revitalized.

[Kai]

If you stripped Feng Shui of its mystical trappings, it would pretty much be culturally bound interior design.  I mean, personally, I favour the Scandanavian open plan style to the traditional Chinese look (though occasionally it can be pulled off in a way I not only appreciate, but is very pleasing to the eye), so really it is a matter of aesthetic inclination and what makes someone feel comfortable, relaxed and revitalized.

On the other hand there are universal human aesthetics dealing with objects within space, corridors and whatnot. I'll refer again to ancestoral environment, the savannah, which has evenly spaced objects and clear corridors. That at least, seems to be clear for any human design.

[Golden Applesauce]

An excerpt from a talk Douglas Adams gave in 1998 to a bunch of atheists, with relevance to Feng Shui and the rest of the 'metaphysical explanations for physical effects' subject.

(...)

There's a very interesting book - I don't know if anybody here's read it - called 'Man on Earth' by an anthropologist who use to be at Cambridge, called John Reader, in which he describes the way that - I'm going to back up a little bit and tell you about the whole book. It's a series of studies of different cultures in the world that have developed within somewhat isolated circumstances, either on islands or in a mountain valley or wherever, so it's possible to treat them to a certain extent as a test-tube case. You see therefore exactly the degree to which their environment and their immediate circumstances has affected the way in which their culture has arisen. It's a fascinating series of studies. The one I have in mind at the moment is one that describes the culture and economy of Bali, which is a small, very crowded island that subsists on rice. Now, rice is an incredibly efficient food and you can grow an awful lot in a relatively small space, but it's hugely labour intensive and requires a lot of very, very precise co-operation amongst the people there, particularly when you have a large population on a small island needing to bring its harvest in. People now looking at the way in which rice agriculture works in Bali are rather puzzled by it because it is intensely religious. The society of Bali is such that religion permeates every single aspect of it and everybody in that culture is very, very carefully defined in terms of who they are, what their status is and what their role in life is. It's all defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a very peculiar set of customs and rituals, which are precisely defined and, oddly enough, they are fantastically good at being very, very productive with their rice harvest. In the 70s, people came in and noticed that the rice harvest was determined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensical, so they said, 'Get rid of all this, we can help you make your rice harvest much, much more productive than even you're, very successfully, doing at the moment. Use these pesticides, use this calendar, do this, that and the other'. So they started and for two or three years the rice production went up enormously, but the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter. Very shortly, the rice harvest plummeted again and the Balinese said, 'Screw it, we're going back to the temple calendar!' and they reinstated what was there before and it all worked again absolutely perfectly. It's all very well to say that basing the rice harvest on something as irrational and meaningless as a religion is stupid - they should be able to work it out more logically than that, but they might just as well say to us, 'Your culture and society works on the basis of money and that's a fiction, so why don't you get rid of it and just co-operate with each other' - we know it's not going to work!

So, there is a sense in which we build meta-systems above ourselves to fill in the space that we previously populated with an entity that was supposed to be the intentional designer, the creator (even though there isn't one) and because we - I don't necessarily mean we in this room, but we as a species - design and create one and then allow ourselves to behave as if there was one, all sorts of things begin to happen that otherwise wouldn't happen.

Let me try and illustrate what I mean by something else. This is very speculative; I'm really going out on a limb here, because it's something I know nothing about whatsoever, so think of this more as a thought experiment than a real explanation of something. I want to talk about Feng Shui, which is something I know very little about, but there's been a lot of talk about it recently in terms of figuring out how a building should be designed, built, situated, decorated and so on. Apparently, we need to think about the building being inhabited by dragons and look at it in terms of how a dragon would move around it. So, if a dragon wouldn't be happy in the house, you have to put a red fish bowl here or a window there. This sounds like complete and utter nonsense, because anything involving dragons must be nonsense - there aren't any dragons, so any theory based on how dragons behave is nonsense. What are these silly people doing, imagining that dragons can tell you how to build your house? Nevertheless, it occurs to me if you disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for it, it may be there is something interesting going on that goes like this: we all know from buildings that we've lived in, worked in, been in or stayed in, that some are more comfortable, more pleasant and more agreeable to live in than others. We haven't had a real way of quantifying this, but in this century we've had an awful lot of architects who think they know how to do it, so we've had the horrible idea of the house as a machine for living in, we've had Mies van der Roe and others putting up glass stumps and strangely shaped things that are supposed to form some theory or other. It's all carefully engineered, but nonetheless, their buildings are not actually very nice to live in. An awful lot of theory has been poured into this, but if you sit and work with an architect (and I've been through that stressful time, as I'm sure a lot of people have) then when you are trying to figure out how a room should work you're trying to integrate all kinds of things about lighting, about angles, about how people move and how people live - and an awful lot of other things you don't know about that get left out. You don't know what importance to attach to one thing or another; you're trying to, very consciously, figure out something when you haven't really got much of a clue, but there's this theory and that theory, this bit of engineering practice and that bit of architectural practice; you don't really know what to make of them. Compare that to somebody who tosses a cricket ball at you. You can sit and watch it and say, 'It's going at 17 degrees'; start to work it out on paper, do some calculus, etc. and about a week after the ball's whizzed past you, you may have figured out where it's going to be and how to catch it. On the other hand, you can simply put your hand out and let the ball drop into it, because we have all kinds of faculties built into us, just below the conscious level, able to do all kinds of complex integrations of all kinds of complex phenomena which therefore enables us to say, 'Oh look, there's a ball coming; catch it!'

What I'm suggesting is that Feng Shui and an awful lot of other things are precisely of that kind of problem. There are all sorts of things we know how to do, but don't necessarily know what we do, we just do them. Go back to the issue of how you figure out how a room or a house should be designed and instead of going through all the business of trying to work out the angles and trying to digest which genuine architectural principles you may want to take out of what may be a passing architectural fad, just ask yourself, 'how would a dragon live here?' We are used to thinking in terms of organic creatures; an organic creature may consist of an enormous complexity of all sorts of different variables that are beyond our ability to resolve but we know how organic creatures live. We've never seen a dragon but we've all got an idea of what a dragon is like, so we can say, 'Well if a dragon went through here, he'd get stuck just here and a little bit cross over there because he couldn't see that and he'd wave his tail and knock that vase over'. You figure out how the dragon's going to be happy here and lo and behold! you've suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in.

So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it's worth remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it's worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there. I suspect that as we move further and further into the field of digital or artificial life we will find more and more unexpected properties begin to emerge out of what we see happening and that this is a precise parallel to the entities we create around ourselves to inform and shape our lives and enable us to work and live together. Therefore, I would argue that though there isn't an actual god there is an artificial god and we should probably bear that in mind. That is my debating point and you are now free to start hurling the chairs around!

(...)

[Cain]

If you stripped Feng Shui of its mystical trappings, it would pretty much be culturally bound interior design.  I mean, personally, I favour the Scandanavian open plan style to the traditional Chinese look (though occasionally it can be pulled off in a way I not only appreciate, but is very pleasing to the eye), so really it is a matter of aesthetic inclination and what makes someone feel comfortable, relaxed and revitalized.

On the other hand there are universal human aesthetics dealing with objects within space, corridors and whatnot. I'll refer again to ancestoral environment, the savannah, which has evenly spaced objects and clear corridors. That at least, seems to be clear for any human design.

True, but many smaller aspects are culturally transmitted as well.

It's like how peoples music taste can differ, despite shared conceptions of music across vast geographical areas.

[Kai]

That was excellent.

So, Chi is an intuitive metaphor for psychosomatics, just as feng shui is an intuitive metaphor for architectural design. I could know how each neuron connects and what their gated channels, I could calculate all the angles and shapes in a room, but it's faster and intuitive to visualize energy flow, or how a dragon might live in that space (at least for the Chinese). There's a level of direct (mystic? in the sense that mysticism is direct connections rather than through intermediaries) connection to the problem which can be far more effective and close at hand than the roundabout way of other methods.