The Mystery of Chi

Two posts back I have suggested that the Chinese concept of chi is present in every culture under other names, and I recited some of them: baraka, prana, and our own concept of grace. We also have a more secular version of it, the élan vital, the life force. In actual use these words often have quite different emphases and connotations. A good example is our use of the word grace. In the religious context it is seen as a special gift from God or a state of being without sin (“state of grace”); in the social context it connotes good upbringing, charm, advanced behavior, fluidity of movement; and then there is “grace under fire.”

All of these uses of the word suggest a kind of elevated state or mode of being; the last phrase is instructive because it suggests holding on to our humanity even when all hell breaks loose. An equivalent of it, the French sang-froid, has the same connotation: cold blooded, thus above the natural state. But notice that in our usage, grace is never equated with the life force as such, whereas it is strongly linked to that concept in Asia. Our usage is the product of our culture, a product of our system of classification. We’re very conceptual. We like to separate. We’ve separated grace from the life force—and this despite the fact that our founding book, the Bible, in Genesis 2:7, tells us that God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” That breath, I would suggest, is chi. The dust of which God formed the body is matter.

Now, mind you, speaking of such matters we’re engaged in the pursuit higher forms of knowledge than our science can ever hope to reach. We’re in the realms of poetry. Poetry’s favorite subject, love, is as foreign to science as is life. The poet dares to call them one and the same thing; science is silent on both. This subject is also ultimately foreign to philosophical approaches unless these acknowledge a higher realm, the realm of revelation. Conceptual approaches cannot capture the essence here, which must be experienced. Concepts divide, poetry unites. But poetry unites without destroying crucial differences that manifest in experience. Indeed the more precise our conceptual understanding becomes, the more it shatters the unity of experience—whereas the life force has the magical result of fusing—without destroying—a vast diversity of materially distinct entities into a unified organism.

One way to get a better feel for the mystery of chi is to picture this fluid, this breath of the divine, as present in everything that lives—and, by organizing matter, becoming visible. At the level of ordinary life—and that dusty little weed growing in the crack of my concrete drive is alive—we might think of chi as already and miraculously present. It announces itself. For all we know it’s also present in the inorganic realm. It may be that energy which defies the laws of inertia and keeps electrons swirling around atomic nuclei. Where do those electrons get their force? And why don’t they ever run down? Those electrons are still swirling, moving, glowing even in the coldest rocks on the frozen continent of Antarctica. And we, ourselves, seem to be made of innumerably many perpetua mobile. Chi may permeate the cosmos. It may be the strong force that keeps the quarks clinging to each other to form protons and neutrons inside the atomic core. In those tiny entities—and they are mere inferences so far as we really know—the energy is invisible. In living things it’s manifest—but, for us, it’s not particularly remarkable. Familiarity breeds contempt. That dusty weed mostly reminds me to pull it. But chi also manifests in much more mysterious and higher form—as grace. And in that form, once more, it becomes invisible. We can, however, still experience it. We experience it as beauty, harmony, intelligence, and benevolence—real phenomena that escape reduction to the visible forms that carry it. That music isn’t violins or black dots on white paper. The grace of that building isn’t merely stone.

This sort of view of chi, poetic and therefore unifying, might be dismissed as a fuzzy sort of pantheism. But what it suggests to me is actually a glimpse into the very structure of reality. I conceive of it as consisting of three distinct but closely related elements always in interaction: matter, energy, and self. Staying with the Chinese modes of naming these things, the first is yin, the receptive, the second yang, the creative, and the third is the Tao. We would call it God, the ultimate Self. A proper view of this structure, I would suggest, emerges when we imagine that the same constituent elements exist at every level of reality, not merely here in on earth. This would suggest that matter has its higher or subtle forms as well—beyond the border I keep talking about. So does energy. So does self, writ small or large. And in that case we get a conceptually sharper view of chi or grace in the bargain. Here is how I would argue that:

What appears as simple energy to us—thus solar power, for example—is chi as it manifests in a lower order of reality. What we call life is that same energy already intensified to a higher pitch, but still embedded in the lower order. It is a sign of a transition between orders, the prelude to entry into the next “mansion” that exists above ours. Living here we’re poised between dimensions, at the very point of transition. What we call grace is the life present in the heavenly reaches touching this one but only, alas, ever so lightly. To have it more abundantly, as suggested in John 10:10, we must cross over.

Pondering Action

In a comment on “Pondering Desolation,” Monique wonders why the life of action is so distracting and compelling—and why it produces imbalances with undesirable results. Good points. Her comment reminded me that life on the frontier, and here of course I mean life on the borderzone, has its own solution to the demand for “action in the world.” We are, after all, supposed to be in the world if not of it. The Sufi tradition is but one of others that calls for realizing spiritual values in the world—but it is a tradition that gives this matter emphasis. In that tradition withdrawal into solitudes—and celibacy, for that matter—are seen as temporary practices to strengthen the individual for the life of action.

I would also note here that in Asia the martial arts, and related practices derived from it, like Tai chi chuan, directly link physical with spiritual action. And there is also the body of useful western observations about types of personalities—inner- and outer-directed (introverts and extroverts), sometimes linked to body types (somatotypes). This last concept was developed by the psychologist William Herbert Sheldon and studied at Yale. Sheldon proposed three body types called endomorphs, mesomorphs, and ectomorphs, roughly associated with personality types that are gregarious-social, active-muscular-athletic, and inward-sensitive-cerebral. People are, or tend toward, one or the other of these. Thus we may be drawn into the social whirl or the world of action by our own temperament. But beneath our temperaments we are all souls, and ways of life that let us express our given natures at the highest form have been developed over time.

I’ve always felt that the Chinese concept of chi, rudely rendered as life force, is perhaps the key to the spiritual life—no matter what our constitution. Four strangers, all from different parts of the world—in a time before English became a world language—met at a tavern and decided to journey together. Some days later they came across an orchard, and all four cried out in delight. One saw cherries, another one les cerise, a third one die kirschen, a fourth called them cseresnye. They saw the same fruit—a sweet red berry with a stone in the middle. The Asian chi or qi, ki, or gi is another’s baraka, the third person’s grace, a fourth traveler’s prana, and so on.

Why does chi flow more readily in the desolation of the desert, on the peak of rocky mountains? Because the distractions of the world have been minimized. Our genuine happiness derives from increasing and concentrating the flow of grace; unhappiness rises when this flow is rapidly dispersed or blocked by endless distractions. The modern error is to confuse baraka with ordinary life energy of the sort we get from carbohydrates. If it were only that, mere over-eating would make us saints. The wisdom of the traditions lies in recognizing that this energy is of another dimensionality, above that of the coarser kind. It is subtle but, when present, of tremendous potency. In very concentrated form it will cure ills spontaneous and more, much more…

The key to spiritualizing action seems to be concentration. The key to concentration is detachment—not in the sense of withdrawal but in the sense of presence. This demands the cultivation of a peculiar sort of duality within ourselves. We must be present to ourselves while simultaneously attending to the action before us. This may sound weird and contradictory, but it isn’t. What we must detach from is identification with the constant upwelling of emotional reaction to anything and everything. It is that automatic commentary of our habit selves—sometimes a whisper, sometimes a shouting, sometimes rage, sometimes hysteria—which actually distracts us. Action only requires seeing the facts, understanding them, selecting the right action—and then doing it. Without commentary. When the phone rings just as we start typing a sentence, the mind shouts, God dammit! I hope that’s not…whatever. A centered self, a concentrated self, a self that has prepared itself in the morning with appropriate meditation—renewed at intervals—will simply…pick up the telephone. The three dots I placed there stand for an inward pause, a conscious breath to suppress the shouting; it’s a reminder.

Yes, yes, already. But it’s hard. — And it is. But in a real sense the distractions are all internal. What’s out there is just the bombardment of facts. The distraction arises when we let them—distract us. From our intention. Our intention to act. We want to focus on something—and therefore, interrupted, we lose our focus. The trick is not to lose our focus even in the midst of interruptions. The result of this, if assiduously cultivated, is that the atmosphere will cool. The mind will become more disciplined. Slowly. Gradually. The flow of chi will increase, less of it will be blown away into the winds of emotion. We will become more efficient. The lower self is in many ways quite like an animal and requires long and tedious training—and retraining. And again.

My own experience is that practices of this type wear out after a while. As I succeed in organizing my own action better, as things calm down, I tend to ease up on the discipline and then over days I gradually slip back into bad habits. But the upside is that each succeeding effort is more successful, and even in these matters habits do build, not least the habit of just clearing the desk when I feel myself getting hysterical—putting the To Do list aside, overcoming the terror and panic of doing so—and beginning all over again with a session of reminders and a forcible recall of what it’s all about. It works—if we do. We learned that last motto, years ago, from Laura Huxley.

I’ll have more to say on this subject. The whole reality of chi and grace has many more interesting aspects. The teachings of Montessori were centered on natural concentration as a “normalizing” phenomenon. I’ll get to it. It’s on the To Do list.