Daoist colour breathing as a source for intelligence development
May 2nd, 2005Daoism, Qigong and Chinese medicine share many cultural similarities, primarily because they are all indigenous Chinese phenomena in the way they present themselves. In their essence they represent visions of humanity about nature, themselves, divinity, time and space that find expression in their own typical ways belonging to their specific cultural niche. Although in their current Avatar they now all are rapidly disseminated over the globe, there are still many aspects of these unknown to the people interested in these cultural phenomena, and typical Chinese. Some aspects are even in China either uncommon knowledge, or near to extinction due to cultural change.
I do not wish to suggest that as an author I have the wisdom or capacity to express these ideas in their only and correct way. As a Western representative of the methodologies that these Daoism, Qigong and Chinese medicine use to make you become part of their cultural reality, I in a way remain a critical bystander, a foreigner, an interpreter and a translator no matter how hard I study and practice. Typical for my approach is though that I assume that experience is something resulting primarily from hardwiring, and not from cultural programming alone. I mean with this that the form of our bodies in what they are and could be does make a difference. The precise adaptation to our potential might be of greater importance then most modern biologist or psychologist would acknowledge, even though neurology suggests similar prognosis, reducing importance more to the brain alone though. As such I think I’d like to see our body as one big brain, an image confirmed by a diversity of scientist over the last century . Modern biology based behaviourist sciences state that every level of human performance is regulated by body chemistry. That is to say that everything you do and everything that you are is a result of your body producing chemicals. Although this view is not scientific because it should be restated then into the observation that behaviour is paralleled by chemical processes within the body and there might be a relation. Fact is that it seems that our body chemistry is regulated by countless numbers of chemical producing organs and glands in our body. Our brain, through our nerve system, controls, coordinates and regulates our organs and glands to produce your body chemistry at the right time and place, made in just the right quantity and quality. Or is it so that body thinking is orchestrating processes happening in our nerves and brain? I do not know if we can be sure.
Another fact is that alteration in body chemistry results in a lessening or improvement of performance of possibly all bodily functions: i.e. adapting to toxins in the environment; physical coordination at work and for sports; digesting and converting food; breathing; resisting and recovering from disease; maintaining emotional balance; handling stress; even creating music, art, literature, poetry and dance; learning, thinking clearly, concentrating and remembering; laughing, crying, communicating, loving, sleeping, conceiving and bearing children; making decisions; forgetting ….in short, everything we do and are is paralleled by the shifting in chemical productions, chance and depositing.
Body chemistry eventually ends up in intra personal chemistry: how do you relate with others, how do others relate to you? What elements are of influence on that?
The importance of so called ‘personal chemistry’ in intra human relations and social success can not be over estimated. Among the ingredients of personal chemistry are
appearance, personality, style, articulatedness, energy radiation, attitude, thoughtfulness, composure, sparkle, breadth of interest, and an aura of leadership.
Personal chemistry can to an extend be developed by means of behavioural therapy or conditioning, by adjusting our clothing style, intonation in speech, suntan or augmentation in the form of implants or extractions, but nothing replaces just being a right fit in the right place at the right time, in short: when all falls in place as by miracle, and all seems fully natural and there’s no questions asked.
Most people get messed up because of the style of living they have, the kind of thoughts they have and the information they get filled with through reading, amusement and other forms of entertainment that feed our need to guard what we call our free time. Free time is a value judgement that seems to mean ‘i can do whatever i want even when it is harmfull.’ And yes, that is true, but in that sense all your time is free time and all time is preparing for the moment when something tries to force our hands. Every moment of our life is therefore preparation time for the next moment. We need to be prepared: mentally, emotionally and physically. To be prepared it means we have to learn to see life as a practice. We do not live life, we do life!
Practice fine-tunes our body’s capacity to be an intelligent creature and our brain and formal ways of thinking (that Wu describes as Western but can as well be found in Chinese thinking or elsewhere on the planet) will fold naturally into the needs of that body. Practice is a form of programming. Programming in our parental culture is relatively easy since I am surrounded by examples of what my culture intends. As a member of one culture learning something from another culture is harder, because it does not become so easily hardwired into our social or biological functioning. More effort is needed, since things have to be rewritten, but also, that is maybe positive: I stand in a more critical relationship with what I try to make mine and am therefore more conscious about that what I try to make mine, I can have more complex thoughts about it. So to come back to my original line of reasoning: if I program correctly I should have had similar experiences as other practitioners that were fully raised within the respective tradition that is under discussion in this text. Difference will come from interpretation resulting from the mixed background I have. This is the anthropological attitude: partake in a culture to come to an understanding of that culture and make known what is useful of that culture to an audience, scientific and or popular. Partaking cannot take place on the basis of ones own preconceptions of how things should be. It should offcourse take place on the surrendering of oneself to the preconceptions of the culture you are going to enter.
The colour breathing method of Shangxing Daojiao and related techniques from a variety of ancient and not so ancient sources are within the context of this study to be seen as a technique leading to the positioning of the practitioner into the hierarchical spheres of the Daoist pantheon. The Daoist pantheon is a real or imaginary space where ideas, concepts, goals, space and time merge into some sort of psychosomatic nexus serving to empower the practitioner into personal development.
The prime practice one has to develop in these techniques is communication. But for communications one needs communication objects, subjects and methods. Method relates to the space in where one communicates. That space is not necessarily a physical space, but a space of ideas, expectations, plans and so on.
Commonly we practice communication with other human beings, with institutions, with animals and sometimes with the divine. From the last one we usually do not expect an answer, but visibly in life a change for the better as a token of appreciation that we talk to that divine. So we entrust our faith in the divine which is repaid and answered to by way of reward. In the west we are not unfamiliar with the idea that messages between people get distorted. As children we used to play games in classrooms to show this in the form of passing a sentence through a line of people and see what would be the end result. Some people became so fascinated by that disruption that much time is being put into research in how the human brain and personality receive information and how it gets distorted. The Original Daoist answer from both Confucianism and Daoism is lack of proper agreements on what meaning belongs to what concepts. Daoism even went a bit further by stating that we miss meaning of things by not being close enough or not embedded enough into nature to comprehend meaning without having to listen. The solution for this problem was developed within ritual and meditation. Qigong as a technique stems from the idea that we need to develop sensitivity and strength to follow nature in the way best suiting to nature. After all, Laozi clearly showed that nature treats us like strawdogs, dolls that have no real value. It is hard for a human being to become strong enough to make nature do as we want. To save ourselves we have to adjust to the methods of nature and then we can survive; endlessly if wished for, and properly managed.
By understanding nature (Tiandao) we come to an understanding of ourselves. But also the other way around: by understanding ourselves we come to understand nature. The idea of ourselves is here identical with our destiny and the way we function. Tianming and Woming can here be equalled in ideal circumstances. Tianming is here the destiny given by sky, the divine principle and Woming the destiny created by ourselves.
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