The Nature of Qi, Pt. 1

Hi, Chris. Hello. How are you? I’m great, buddy. Woohoo. Cheers. Cheers. So what are we doing? We are talking about qi, the nature of Qi, how it influences traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncture, martial arts. Did I miss anything? Well, there’s a whole bunch of things I would like to. That’s a bad start, then. That’s a great start. Chi does. Qi is kind of at the foundation of all of it, because it says somewhere, I’ve heard somewhere, and it was kind of a mind blowing statement, and it is for someone like you or I, who’s into Chinese martial arts and Chinese philosophy and Taoism and all that. Right. Or Chinese medicine, to say that everything is qi, even the Tao. So you would think that nothing categorically precedes the Tao, but this isn’t true. According to the tradition, yes. That she becomes, in a way, the fundamental aspect of the universe, the ground of the universe, or that which the universe and everything else is made of. But before we get into that. Oh, man. Yes. I think we need to take a step back, because one of the problems that we all have is that we start talking about chi, but we never say what exactly chi is. And I think unless we do that, and then unless we have a context so that we actually understand what we’re saying, none of that makes sense. Like, even the statement, you know, chi proceeds to the Tao is like, well, mm hmm. What the fuck is the chi? What do we mean by chi? That’s really one of the questions. Right. And because my concern always is that we can’t isolate some of these ideas and just go, well, they’re Chinese, and they’re therefore different, or eastern. So they’re separated from kind of our western experience. They’re separated from more western understanding of the universe and how physics works and all that. This is a particular interest of yours, which I greatly appreciate. It’s also because otherwise, the entire concept cannot be understood or cannot be bioavailable. It’s an idea that can’t be useful to us until we’ve processed it enough that it actually resonates, that there’s something there that we can go, okay, you can hang your head on it and go, okay, this is something that I can actually use you or understand without making that leap of just going, well, there is no understanding. It’s this mysterious eastern concept, and you just have to accept it on faith. That’s not how. That’s not how a Chinese doctor would use Qi. They don’t go, oh, I don’t know what it is, but I’ll just use it in my acupuncture. They have a very solid definition and understanding of what it is and how it works. So we’re kind of prevented from having that understanding because culturally, we’re not from the same place. So there’s a cultural block there. And also, I think it’s worth asking that question, what exactly when we talk about Qi, what does it mean? Is it the same qi, when we talk about the qi that precedes the Tao as when we talk about chi in a martial art context or qi in an acupuncture? Let’s extract what we mean when we say something like qi. To say the qi precedes the Tao means that somehow even the Tao is made of qi. Yes. What are we saying when we say that? We’re saying that chi is that fundamental. It’s that much of a foundational substrate of everything. So in this quest to, like, define chi, we might want to wonder whether or not it’s the same thing as asking, is it the same thing as mana prana, orgone? Exactly. Tachyons, monopoles, the ether. Exactly. We need to kind of define it, because I know that, and I think part of it is narrowing down what exactly we’re talking about, because I know that essentially, Qi can have different definitions, even within a Chinese context. So that an acupuncturist is using qi in a slightly different way than a martial artist would be using qi or a philosopher would be using qi, they’re actually talking about something slightly different. Right. So we’re taught, because, for example, in Chinese, traditional Chinese medicine, qi can be the action of the organs, or, like, the way that an organ relates to others and the way that it functions. Right. The way that it relates. Right. But in martial arts, that’s not the way chisel is thought of, because, in a way, each category, which each. Each art, no medicine or martial or philosophical is going to use the definition that is useful to its own, to its own practice. So by definition, so it’s leaving other definitions. And so I think when we talk about, like, the qi that precedes the Tao, we’re in kind of the philosophical taoist discussion, like qi as an elemental part of the universe, as a. As one of the functions of the universe, one of the qualities of the universe, as opposed to, for example, you know, in acupuncture, you’re talking about chi as not the universal force, but the personal force that is within the body. Now, they’re related, and they have it. They’re gonna have an echo, but they’re not exactly the same thing. Right. So I think that’s the first thing, is like, there is no, not no single sheet. She is a category of interactions, a category of relationships. Like all things exists on a continuum. And especially in all spiritual avenues of inquiry, you, you run into paradox, and that’s where things get the most interesting. Yes. Which is what Taoism points us at. Yes. And points us at the fact that the Tao cannot be told, the name cannot be named. That which is nameless is what’s eternally real. So, and then the paradox actually is where the reality actually is. Amen. Amen. Tell you what, so where am I? Mind was going as you were talking, is the fact that in the way that these things may exist on a continuum, so does chi, in the sense that, for instance, there’s a, there’s an acupuncture point, Sanjao, for it’s the, what’s called the source point. So all the points on the channels have a point that’s considered the source point of that channel where that. Where that point on the meridian or the channel or the jing Mai receives qi and it receives source qi. So the San Jo, or the container for the three burners of the body, somewhat separate from the three Dan tien, you know, so the three burners are contained here, here and here, whereas the three Dan tian are here, here and here. So the source point on the source, on the chat on the organ, the channel for the organ which receives and manages source qi. It’s kind of a mysterious points. One of my favorite points for that reason, but that’s a distinction in Qi that’s made in Chinese medicine, is there’s qi. There’s, say, for instance, in Chinese medicine, we’ve got our eight extraordinary vessels which are actually formed from, to a certain extent, formed from the twelve ordinary channels, but they’re prenatal. So you have the eight extraordinary vessels on your body as a fetus, and then once you take your first breath, you have these twelve channels pop into existence on the body. That’s a theory. Who knows? I don’t assert any kind of metaphysical reality to any of this. Right. That’s what makes us taoist, isn’t it? Anyway. But that’s a gradation in chi that is made that when you receive the breath, when you take your first breath, you’re animating these twelve channels in the body. But there’s a form of qi called Yuan qi, or source chi, in the same way that there’s source aspects to Jing Qi and Shen, the substance the energy, the breath, the spirit of the body. There’s source aspects to all this. So all of it exists on a continuum. Right. And if the Tao is made of qi, then all of it’s made of qi. So we can think of Chi as being fundamental, because chi is also the intermediary in the same way that man, so to speak, is the intermediary in Tianrin Di. We have ren being the man or intermediary aspect that goes between the go between of heaven and earth. So chi is somehow fundamental in that way, too. And you alluded to that. You just alluded to that as chi being, what, at least in your. Your analysis of the Chinese medical. Yes. Aspect of it. Yeah, yes, yeah, yeah. And I think that’s also fundamental idea, the idea of, you know, the three partite nature of the universe. You know, there is this. This connection. There is a need for that connection. The minute heaven and earth separate or even in contact, then that point of contact becomes something new. So there’s always something in between, essentially, heaven and earth, because between the physical and the spiritual, in a way. So even if they’re. Even if they’re indivisible, even if they’re of the same stuff, because, I mean, this is very much a vao idea that mind and body are not separate. Spirit and body are not two separate things that with a different nature, they’re interconnected. But then she becomes the intermediary between those two poles, essentially, the furthest shen, the further spiritual you are, and earth and the body, but they’re still connected through qi. So qi becomes this substance which connects. That actually is. And this is why it’s exceptional, is because it has aspects of both. It’s both grounded in the material and is affected by the spiritual, by the immaterial. So it’s this strange middle substance or that actual both. Well, let me ask you something. Is calling it a substance that’s the big problem? Yes. It can be thought of a substance insofar as it’s like a. It’s the establishment of, like a resonance. It’s. It’s. It’s the extent to which perhaps two points in space or not even just anything exists in. Within a field of resonance. There’s a term for this called ganying. Ganying is a little bit. It translates as cause an effect. So I’m thinking of it in the way that, like, I’m thinking of it as entanglement, like we were talking about it last night. So, because then the question becomes, is qi a substance, or is it actually the field that allows the elements within this field to communicate. It’s like, in the same way that a wave is a movement of the water. So is chi the wave, or is chi the water? Right. So is it the substance, or is it, you know, like an electrical field or electricity? Or is it the field in which everything plays? But. But let’s go back to this idea. It’s got to be both. Yeah. So let’s go back to the entanglement thing, because I think one of. One of the really important ideas is. And this is in western physics. Yeah. Or one of the major crises right now is that since the seventies, basically, there’s been no major breakthrough in. In physics in the west. Basically, physics is stuck. And the latest thing is, you know, dark energy and dark matter and all that kind of stuff. So, basically, they’ve come back to the idea of ether. There’s an invisible, invisible substance somehow, but which is actually 90% of the universe. Right? So. And even that is. So there’s a mathematical fudge factor that is given in the same way that. So Maxwell and Maxwell’s field equations. Maxwell was doing. This is my understanding, Maxwell was doing four dimensional geometry, a little bit like Whitehead, like Alfred North Whitehead. Maxwell was doing higher dimensional geometry in order to explicate the mathematics used to determine the properties of any field. This is the guy who came up with the theory of what a field is, what an electromagnetic or field is. And so people who do, electricians or who work in electronics, they are exposed to this, and they have to use Maxwell’s equations to do things. Here’s the funny thing. In their parlance, they refer to them as Maxwell’s equations. They’re actually not Maxwell’s equations. There’s this other English gentleman, this mathematician that came after Maxwell, named Heaviside. Heaviside came, took all of Maxwell’s voluminous work on the nature of the field, and he took out these components, this four dimensional geometry and mathematics that Maxwell has in his equations. And Heaviside said, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. Slice it down, take off the fat. So now they’re applicable to electronics and electricians and to doing the work of managing and redirecting electricity so that we can be talking on these things. The same thing happens in even quantum mechanics, where they’re given a fudge factor, because Planck, the way that Planck, Max Planck discovered what a Planck is, this Planck length, or the Planck length, the Planck constant, the smallest possible measurement of time and space. Length, dimension width, velocity, spin, the highest possible measurement of temperature and speed. Somehow, simultaneously, as this minute thing, which is. Which is synonymous with a quanta. That’s what a quanta is. That’s my understanding. Right. Is the quantum. What we see in quantum physics is the same kind of fudge factor given. So, ever since Mickelson, Morley, and them writing off the existence of the ether and all this kind of stuff, we’ve moved further away from materialism and yet had quantum mechanics kind of creeping up under here. And they consistently, because of both an intellectual paradigm that we’ve been in for a few hundred years now, as well as ease of trying to make these things applicable, like, they probably wouldn’t be colliding protons together the way that they are if they had to contend with the actual ether, with the actual Planck density that we are in, which is an infinite amount of energy. It’s an infinite amount of energy. Yeah. No, exactly. It’s this unwillingness to deal with what really comes out of quantum mechanics. And this is what Whitehead dealt with, like, where he said, hey, excuse me. None of you are really looking at what this actually means. Your fudging, like, this whole fudge factor is a way to avoid the real consequences of what these. Of these theories, that if you truly apply these theories, things, we would understand the world and the universe in a completely different way. And so the last hundred years, essentially, since quantum mechanics was kind of developed, was essentially a resistance to what quantum mechanics actually is saying, which is why you have all these fudge factors, which is why you have all these things, you know, like, cosmological constant, where, you know, you do all your equations, and then you multiply everything, your results, by 1.8, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because there’s this slight skewing and nobody knows why. All they know is that the math works if you apply these fudges, right? And part of it. And what Whitehead was pointing is, like, all of this is happening because you’re stuck with this mechanical view of the universe. So you’re doing. You’re changing your mathematics so that your math kind of works, but so that way you don’t have to take in the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics, right? And so. And that’s why physics has been stuck, because they’ve been avoiding all the, you know, this entire area of, like, the implications of quantum mechanics. And you keep having these. These moments where some people, some physicists stick up their hand and go, hey, hey, hey, look at this. If I do my math this way, I get a completely different result. But the implications are that we’re not in this kind of mechanical universe that we still think we are, that we still believe we are. Like the work on black holes. I actually was an italian physicist, if I remember correctly, who was the first one to go, hey, if I use five dimensions instead of four, in my equations about black holes, instead of having a singularity, which is basically the moment where math breaks down, where literally math stops making sense, but if you make the same calculations and using a five dimensional model, there is no singularity. The math works perfectly, but in five dimensions. And so, again, nobody goes, oh, holy shit, we’re living in a five dimensional world. No, they don’t. They just go and go, oh, yeah, maybe, maybe let’s stick with, you know, our fudged or fudged physics, because. Because it means that you don’t have to look at what it really means. And a five dimensional world actually solves a lot of problems. That’s really interesting, because the idea of a singularity doesn’t gives me great peace. So it’s not so in my. At least physical, because neither of us are physicists. Philosopher. Yes. So, in my grappling with these concepts, I don’t see a singularity as being terribly different from the Tao. And what you’re saying is that, you know, and again, I don’t understand the mathematics of it, but we can. We know at least that people like Alfred North Whitehead, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. And, you know, Maxwell, you know, there’s four dimensional mathematics out there, four dimensional geometry, and that includes time. Time is this fourth dimension where you take an object and you move it through this dimension, a three dimensional object. Well, how does it get from here to here? It’s through time. Through time, yeah. And the fifth dimension is this ability to. In a sense, I mean, this is how I think of it, at least choose which direction in time. You now have a three dimensional object moving from here to here in the. In this span of time. Well, it’s not like all of time is only going one linear direction. We do perceive this thing we call free will, you know. Does it really exist on all levels and in all dimensions? I don’t know, but, yeah. So it’s not so much the writing off of the singularity, it’s what compels me about what you were telling us earlier. Is that the ability to even mathematically for physicists, and that paper that you’re referring to, you showed it to me. It came out in 2008. 2008, yeah, April 8, as a matter of fact. 2008. Yes. Yeah. No, I mean, a lot of this is recent. Well, recent, it’s not. We’re not talking about the 1940s or fifties. It’s because physicists have been banging their head against the wall for all this time with no result, because they’re not taking into account all the implications. They’re not. They’re not looking at what people like what had been saying since the thirties, and they’re still resisting that idea, because even in this idea, you know, you’re talking about, you know, fifth dimension isn’t being free will, this idea of, you know, moving through time. But I don’t know if it’s free will as opposed to just will, like the intent. Sure. You know, and us, I mean, so what does that feel like when in. When it’s expressed with the most. Well, I mean, we call it in mathematics and in physics, they call it degrees of freedom. And when you take a system. Right. Yeah. It’s degrees of freedom determine its ability to the different kinds of outcomes that it can determine for itself. For itself. So, which was also Whitehead’s idea of nodes of action that are related to each other. And that’s actually the components of the universe is actually these nodes that are reacting to each other both forward and backwards in time and all that. So, essentially, will is at the core of the interactions of every element in the universe. So there’s an element of will. There’s an element. This is where the kind of the animists view of the universe becomes the most correct one. You know, where everything is alive. Everything has a. Will has an intention, desire towards a specific outcome. But just to hit another point, though, like, you were talking about entanglement, right? Physicists right now are still baffled by how entanglement works. Now, again, this is something that was described 100 years ago. That’s in the math of quantum mechanics. You know, two particles that are separated by a distance that are paired, and if you act on one automatically, it acts on the other. And there is no. I love to hammer this point because it’s not. You’re not saying that. You jiggle one and the other one goes, oh, I’ll jiggle two. It’s the same object at two separate points in space. So there’s this other quantum property called superposition, where they’ve been able to, like, separate it, like, kind of holographically, kind of like, take an object and go, it’s the same object. That’s entanglement, too. Right? So there’s these overlapping quantum properties like superposition and entanglement. And entanglement is the same object, in other words. Yeah. And there’s no delay in action if you act on one. So something beyond time is happening beyond time and space. Very much so. And the fact that physicists still have no clue how that works. No. Shows that how stuck they are. Because they’re still thinking mechanically. Where philosophically, in our. In our. We’ve solved you. We’ve solved know it all. Exactly. We have solved the problem already. No, but you see, but this is where if you. If you. It’s actually entirely intuitive. To the essence of human. Human rationality with the world. You talking about this animus perspective. And somehow simultaneously, again, not only the animus perspective of everything being a manifestation of its own will to exist, but at the same time, there’s a monad. When you drill down far enough. So it’s not. It’s not. We got last night we were talking about kind of like, is it a mono. Monotheist interpretation of what’s going on? And, like, that doesn’t bother me at all, because it’s still all one thing. All one thing. Yeah. God. If God is one. Let’s take a monotheist bent for a second. And this is something that I often talk about when talking to religious or spiritual people, which I consider myself to be. That when we fall into stories of separation, the kind of habit of the mind, which might lead me to believe that I am somehow separate from Eucharist, which is false, right. That anything, if God is one. Or if, let’s just say, reality. Reality is somehow this fluid one thing all happening all at the same time. Philosophically, then this God, this creator, this whatever. Cannot, by its very definition, give birth to anything which is not also itself. Itself. It cannot be separated, be whole and one. And then say, I’m going to make this. Now, people might say, God can do whatever God wants. And this is also true. This is also true. This kind of gets at the dimensionality where we talk about, well, what even is free will. And here in this life, experiencing this contrast with this human experience, I feel a kind of freedom calling out to me, calling out to my heart, asking me to feel more of it. And the power that it gives me, free and freedom. And so I like that. That on the one level, you have an interiority. It’s sometimes described as an interiority to everything. That everything is kind of exists of itself. It’s kind of auto poetic or poetic is one of its self created. Everything is reality. It’s emergent from itself. And yet so it has its own kind of. Not just interiority, but some kind of individuality too, somehow expressed in some way against the rest of the world. World. Yet that’s a paradox, because that’s not true. How? That’s not true at all. All right. Yes. Yeah. Because if you grant. So, again, it’s not. I don’t think free will is the correct term, but will to everything. So the question then is, is this will? So if this fifth dimension is an expression of this will is the totality of that will God, essentially. And this is where we get into a situation where is there an answer? I mean, we can look at cultural traditions to see and know. Yeah, exactly. We know that every cultural tradition except for ours in the last 200 years has gradation of spirit. Right. There are smaller spirits, bigger spirits. There’s gods, there’s heroes, there’s creator gods. There’s gods that are met, like in the taoist pantheon. The gods are actually not creator gods. The Tao is what created the universe. Sure. The gods are just managers in a way, of creation. And then below that, you also have spirits, demons, all that kind of stuff. So there’s a hierarchy of spirit, and then beyond that, you get into the essentially non personified spirit, where now you’re beyond individuality. You know, gods with individualities, it’s forces, and then it becomes more and more impersonal until finally you get to the Tao, which is simply the expression of creation. There was a point in the evolution of religious Taoism where the Tao was deified as Shang di. So they did essentially turn the Tao into a person. Like, they anthropomorphized the Tao as a person. But you’re right that the one biggest, the two biggest, the three biggest, the 10,000 things, and in that two and three and everything, until the myriad things is included, in a way, I mean, various. What’s cool is that it is a mirror image of the natural world. So there’s two theories. Either it’s this idea of kind of. They’re both true. The multilayered kind of spiritual realm is simply because we looked around and go, oh, well, there’s trees and there’s monkeys and chipmunks and bears and us. So there’s a hierarchy of consciousness on, you know, in the world that we inhabit. So therefore, there’s a hierarchy of consciousness in the spiritual world. So it could simply be that mirroring. It’s just because this is what we see. But there’s a lot of very deep spiritual traditions that in where these people were not fucking around when, you know, in terms of their meditation and their internal research, these are people who, after meditating 10 hours a day for most of their lives, you just say internal research. Yes. You know, like, damn, it’s good. Turning the gaze inwards. Right? And so internal research. Yeah, research. Absolutely. You know, and looking inside and go, so these are. These are not people. And especially since it’s several traditions, it’s not just like one group of people is saying this. This is something we find in basically every single tradition that there is this kind of hierarchy of spirit. Right. There’s a gradation of spirit so that the continuum of existence goes from earth to spirit. Right. But it’s a. It’s a gradation going from the most material to the most ethereal. Right. Very much tripartite. Earth, man, and heaven. Like this idea of gradation between. From one state to the other. And so just to tie all this in together. So this idea of a five, at least, at a minimum, five dimensionality gives us an out, gives us a mechanism that explains both kind of in the western context, you know, in terms of physics, that explains, you know, when particles are entangled, explains, you know, black holes. Instead of breaking the math, if you just do it in five dimensions, now the math actually works. So there’s a. There’s a kind of. A real kind of western answer there. If you start thinking, okay, maybe it is about having more than the dimensions that we’re aware of right now. So five dimensions, at least. But then it also means that if we accept this five dimensionality, then the. The explanations that we get about Qi, about spirits and all that are a different way of explaining the same phenomenon. It’s. It’s a Taoist going, you know, they don’t have the language that we have, of course, mechanics, but they’re explaining the same thing. So, because now we have either will or. Or information as a component of the universe, as a component of creation. Information doesn’t imply will. No, but I mean, information is. That’s the medium of will. Like, how is Will transmitted? Will is expressed through the information that it contains. Right. Will towards something. So you can’t have will without information. So will is a way of imprinting information, if that makes sense. Yeah. Right. So will. And it’s easy to conceive of everything as being composed of information. We’re so mired in computer science metaphors where I can very easily think of the chair that I’m sitting up being made of all the information it requires to make a chair. And this is a lot of what they talk about in this is an easy kind of read that a lot of philosophers and physicists are moving towards, and even psychologists are moving towards to try and cohere the the implications of quantum mechanics on other fields, that everything is really information theory or whatever. But I agree with you. That is a trap that is imposing, again, these kind of western. It’s not the same thing as spirit. Yes, exactly. And that’s why I’m saying I’m using will and information. But it’s both. It’s not just information. Isn’t this funny? We were talking last night about how Schrodinger, the guy who came up with Schrodinger’s equation, he wrote, what is life? He had a cat. He had a cat, and it was a zombie cat. Yes. Right. Is it dead? Is it alive? And so, you know, Schrodinger’s cat. Schrodinger’s cat implies a certain interpretation of the. I love this. A certain interpretation of the coke, of the Copenhagen interpretation, which is that, you know, that if the, if you put some poison in the box and you don’t know, but you put some food right next to it and whatever, and if the cat eats the food, it’s gonna, it’s gonna get oofed. And if it doesn’t, it’s alive. So so long as you’re not looking at what’s in the box, the cat is somehow in a informational superposition. It’s in a state of both being both dead and alive, which is kind of baloney. So here’s, we can get into bohmian mechanics from there. But do you know that that whole point, the whole point of Schrodinger’s cat is that it’s an insane and ridiculous statement. It’s an attack on the Copenhagen. So that’s funny, people. Okay, so that’s funny because people use it as, like, oh, isn’t this cool that this would be true? Yeah. And to a certain extent, I can conceive of it as being true and not true, because the potential for me to run my car off the road when I’m driving home is always there. It’s always present. And so there’s, so I’m existing in a field of information, which is all, you know, that exists all through time and possibility, this fifth dimension of what we might call the freedom to move an object for something in me, to somehow move an object through time and space in this direction or that direction. But I don’t know where we are at this point. I know what I want to say something. Yes, go for it. Go ahead. Well, I want to say, when I say it’s different than. I didn’t finish my point about Schrodinger, but that’s okay. Good. Well, just that one of Schopenhauer’s books and his major philosophy, thankfully, is contained in the title of his book, which is the world as will and representation. The world as will and representation. And then Nietzsche picked up on this, called it the will to. I mean, he called it the will to, I think, the will to maybe just the will. And then, I’m not sure. And then Nietzsche called it the will to power. And then you have other people calling it. What was the guy, the logotherapy guy who wrote the logo therapy book, calling it the will to meaning, so these different things. And I like that. I like that because. RiGht. So anyway, Schopenhauer was influenced by Vedic philosophy, which has a very non dual understanding of the consciousness that’s trying to arise through us. And then Schopenhauer influenced Schrodinger, the physicist who, who did all that and then is apparently making this, like, statement about the absurdity, you’re saying, of the Copenhagen interpretation. Because, in a way, again, will comes in and solves the equation. Because the cat is not both alive and well and dead. Because it also. Because part of the irony of, like, putting the cat in the box and going, well, until we look at the cat, it’s both. A lot of them say that’s saying that the cat has no will, has no heart in this, this game, but it does because the bacteria floating on the little mote of dust in the air in the box. EXACTLY. If consciousness is right, consciousness is about the consciousness of the box itself. Exactly. So there are choices being made every moment of creation. Right. And I think there was this Buddhist monk who, like, let it slip that the universe is actually being created and destroyed every single moment. So the moment is universe is here, and then it’s destroyed, and then it’s recreated and then destroyed every single moment. And what connects the two moments is the will, essentially, where basically, there’s a vote that is made by every single particle in the universe going, where are we going now? And based on where they were and who’s next to them, that’s what recreates the universe. It gives me both a sense of great freedom and responsibility simultaneously, in a. In a manifestational sense, like, what’s the reality that I’m creating if I’m somehow the observer of this mysterious process going on? Not just the observer, but a participant? Very much. So. Who is it that’s looking through my eyes and what power is endowed in me when I took my. This first breath and animated my channels. And now I’m somehow here, and people call me Connor. What the hell’s going on? Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s. That’s the great irony right now, is that we’re all unconscious participants. We are members of a democracy, but we don’t know that we’re voting, and so we’re voting blind because we’re not going. Wait a minute. Damn. I’m. That’s beautiful. Right? I love. That’s why I love that. I love. I. I love, again the power and the freedom both of those simultaneously. See, with great power comes great responsibility, blah, blah, blah. But it also. I mean, yeah, I like to tell people when I have these kinds of conversations, I say, look, Chris, the whole universe would not exist without you, buddy. That’s right. And I agree with that. Yes, yes. But, yeah, thing is, and this is where people get lost sometimes, is that it’s not just us, because we are in an animist universe, which means everything else, the trees also have a vote. You know, the chipmunks have a vote. Everything. The stars have a vote. They have will. They have. And they have a will of the will. That’s why they exist. Yeah. So. Which is why we don’t have infinite power. We can’t just kind of will, you know? Oh, I’m gonna. If this is true, then if I will something strong enough, it will. Will happen. Well, maybe, but if the world around you is saying, no, not really, we don’t really want to make this happen, then it’s not going to happen. Amen. Right. But what is, what does. And I love this because it gets into the domain of the power of manifestation and magic and all those kinds of things. And so what does. I mean, does it matter? Does it matter the words to the incantation, or does it matter how you feel when you’re doing it? So what is it? That’s. What is it that’s coming through? Is that possibly what the feeling of the will to exist is in you? Because there’s something that’s motivating that. And yes, it can. Yes, it can happen in shadow. And yes, you can do some crazy shit and manifest things in shadow, and you’ll see the results. But I might posit that this is not your reason for being here. This does not accord vibrationally. This does not resonate with your essence, this singularity, so to speak, that’s at the core of your being. So the heart in Chinese medicine and in taoist alchemy and all that. Yeah. Is it says that the heart’s true nature, essentially is quiescence, is stillness. And so this according to, like, Nassim Harameen’s theories about the fact that it takes any singularity for any field to exist in the first place, and that he equates the proton at the center of every atom with a black hole. And so, in other words, you go through the event horizon and you pass into this space where all information is compressed into one thing. You go through this wormhole into essentially, what. What do we want to call it? The Akashic records? You go into this space where all information is contained. And that space is what’s literally informing the creation of reality itself. Nassim Haramin says that reality is actually the white hole radiation that’s escaping the event horizon of the black hole that’s at the center of every possible point in space. It also says in taoist alchemy, that’s why I love the overlap between taoist alchemical theory and specifically Nasemhar Amin’s, his physics, his sort of philosophy. Is that it? I mean, Liu Yeming, what is that 18th century taoist alchemist philosopher, said that the one opening of the mysterious female, which was referred to in the Tao Te Ching, and it’s this kind of unification of yin and yang. The mysterious female, this kind of yang yin fusion, just the one opening. The one opening of the mysterious female, it has no position, no form, no shape, no image. Right. But yet there’s all this other taoist alchemical theory about where does it exist in the body? Is it here? Is it here? Is it here? Is it a little bit to the rear? Is it a little bit anterior to that? No. He’s like, it’s everywhere and it’s nowhere. And so what is that? Other than the. The peephole through which spirit itself is whispering, to use the still, small voice of the heart? It is the. Yes, yes, but. And behind that peephole is actually a unified will. Absolutely. Because that’s the. That’s the connection. The message, that’s what allows everything to be connected is because through each of these points is actually a connection to the totality. But I want to go back to that because I want to go back because I do think that this is where taoist alchemy and all this and the relationship of the heart to the flow of QI is actually a key to understanding how all this works. But one of the things I want to go back to, this idea of will, and everything has a will. There is in the tarot cards designed by Alistair Crowley. The card strength was changed to lust because it’s about desire. And I think this is where we go from will as something which is in the brain to desire, which is more in the heart. It’s less cerebral. It’s not the will to something like, I’m not going to manifest something because I’m thinking about it. I’m gonna manifest it. Because you desire it. Yes, because desire is something that you can find throughout the living world. Like a tree desires sunlight, desires water. So desire, right, is actually. That’s a whole can of worms. It’s a can of worms I’m particularly impassioned about recently, lately is this difference between. So it’s interesting. So Alistair Crowley, God rest his soul, a little bit of a freak. Just a bit. And nothing wrong being a freak. We should. We’re all freaks. Let’s be freaks. Okay. But you know, you know, shadow, when you encounter it, you do what thou wilt. Yeah. And love is the law. This sounds great in theory. And I, and I am all for freedom. I’m all for freedom, actually. Full stop. Full stop. But in the higher orders of Thelema, there were teachings that contradicted that very premise. So that’s fine. But here’s what’s interesting. Lust is not the same thing as the freedom that you feel when you know what your heart is asking you to desire to bring into manifestation. That’s why desire is a better word than lust. Lust is too many kind of connotations, let’s be clear. So, like, I mean, lust is a sin. Yes. Because lust. Lust is founded on, I’m going to satisfy something which may be totally natural and even innocent. Even innocent. The desire to have the thing satisfied can be entirely innocent and all that. But it’s the degree to which you see the thing that is capable of meeting that desire for you as separate from you. So this is the, this is the definition of lust. Sin means without. It means without knowing and accepting and acting from a place of your own innate, inherent divinity. Yes. Which is, which is why desire is a better word than lust. But I think what’s important, what’s important is to recognize that essentially the greatest magician of the, you know, 19th and 20th century pinpointed as the strength and lust. Yeah. Yeah. That essentially, desire is the motivating force throughout the universe. That is what changes and shapes reality. Right. Yes. So that’s what brings us back to Taoists chemical work, because it’s all very much about the heart, like all the transformation of chi happens in the heart. It doesn’t happen in the head. Right. It happens in the heart. Yeah. Right. So again, we’re back to this idea that it’s this desire, and it’s also what Whitehead talked about. So each. Each point in space desires an outcome, which is why everything is animated, and everything has a will, has a desire to work something. And so desire, which also resides in the heart, is also what’s described as the heart, is the place of transformation. Amen, brother. I’ll tell you what. So that. So now we can go back to Chi and Taoism. No. So my partner, Laura, she. She hear her saying this brief little story from Sufism, from sufi poetry, which is that God made the rocks and was, like, nice, shiny, sometimes, you know, sparkly even. Very pretty. Very pretty. I’m gonna make more, though. God made the plants. It’s, like, green, beautiful. Some of them taste good and sweet, and some of them, you know, it’s good for medicine. It’s, like, gonna keep going, though. We’re on a roll here. Okay. Animals or even, you know, fish. Four leggeds. Right? Yeah. Cute. Fuzzy. Cute little. Sounds beautiful. Some of them have feathers. Still not it. It’s not quite it. So I don’t mean to paint. Here’s the interesting thing is, I don’t mean to paint an anthropocentric story here, but that is the implication. So we’re just going to go with it. It’s actually inherent in all of it. It’s actually inherent in the whole story, but that’s. We’ll just go with it. And that is that God made mankind humankind and says, this is how I will know myself. So the very point of creation is the desire to connect with the source from which you came. Yes. Well, the one thing that makes us different from the rest of creation, essentially, is the fact that we can observe ourselves experiencing creation, whereas an animal is just experiencing it. What do you mean by that? We can have our consciousness of going, oh, I am now desiring this jelly donut metacognition, in other words, so that we’re conscious of our own thinking, about thinking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s the only thing that makes us different. You know what’s funny, though? I think that your cat, and by your cat, I mean my cat and your cat, our cats, they. That metacognitive thing is probably more akin to the very thing in the mind, in the human mind, which we know to be most troublesome in life. It’s what creates, for gross lack of a better word, ego, seriousness, taking this whole ride way too seriously. Whereas your cat may not necessarily know like, I am, I have a bank account. But I bet you they experience the effects of their desire manifesting the thing in their life, which they. Yeah, right? So it’s the baby chicks, the baby chick experiment, where they put the random number generator. Generator on the roomba. Okay? They put a random number generator on a roomba. And so for anybody listening to this who’s not familiar with the random number generator experiments, this is a Stanford series of experiments that’s been ongoing for decades, I don’t know how long, decades now, where they find that any event of collective, focused, conscious, focused awareness, attention from humans are their subjects. This is what’s cool about it. Humans are their subjects. And so the OJ Simpson chase or Princess Diana’s funeral and stuff like this, where you have incredibly large numbers of people’s attention focused on the same object that is their television, in this case, these random number generators that are placed around the planet, they deviate from random. They’re no longer random. There’s all kinds of ways that they’ve been able to mess with this, all kinds of ways. You can even have a person sit in front of one of these RNGs, random number generators. A person sit in front of one of them. And what the machine is doing is it’s averaging zeros or ones over a certain time interval. And whenever it moves to one zeros or ones being dominant over a certain time interval, it’ll either light a red light or a green light, right? So it’s randomly going red, green, green, red, green. And you can have a person sit in front of it and you can say, make it go green. And they go and it goes green. But talk about the chicks, because that’s. Isn’t it good? Isn’t it good? There’s a roomba in a room. There’s a roomba in a room. And it’s got a random number generator in this arena. And the random number generator is programmed to the mechanisms in the room, but to determine where it’s turning. So at a certain time interval, whether it’s zeros or ones or whatever, it will go left or it will go right at a certain time interval. So it goes this until the random number changes again. It goes right, goes left, goes left again, goes right, goes right again, goes left. And so it’s just doing it randomly. If you look at it over time, it looks like a random thing. You put chicks in there? Baby chicks. We’re talking about young chickens, not young women, not young women, because that would be a very different experiment. Yes. Yes. And so you do the baby chicks with the roomba, random number generator roomba thing, and the roomba is still doing its thing, but it’s got baby chicks imprinted on it. Now. It’s like baby chicks are following around this roomba, and what they do is after the imprinting happens and the baby chicks think this roomba is mommy, you separate the chicks out with a glass pane so they can see the arena with the roomba, and they’re all with their faces against the glass like, mommy, mommy, mommy. The roomba then spends 50% of its time on the side of the room where the baby chicks are, instead of randomly going through, the baby chick’s intention to be closer to their mother, manipulates the random number generator that’s determining the roomba’s movement. So we talk about it being. So it’s not anthropocentric, it’s not centric in any way. It’s desire. Desire, correct. And anyway, we can see how there’s a gradation of intellect, of self awareness throughout the animal world. So it’s not like we’re exceptional and we’re not the only ones who can self reflect. So we’re. We’re at the tip of evolution in terms of self awareness, but we’re not. It’s not like ex nihilo creation. Suddenly we have self awareness and nobody else has it. Again, it’s a gradation of all absolute. Yeah, absolutely. But, yeah, but again, it’s desire which is the motivating factor. It’s. Those baby chicks had a desire for an outcome. They wanted to come back to a desire for an outcome. Yeah. Interesting. So I keep. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think desire just seems to be the. The best descriptor of that, as opposed to will or lust or whatever it is. I agree with you completely. Absolutely. It’s a desire for an outcome, desire for something to happen, whether it’s, you know, a tree desiring even. Even water. What’s even better is that the most powerful form of desire is the desire, which is in alignment with the heart. So if the heart’s nature is stillness, as it said in taoist alchemy, and that the movement of this still point in our center, which is our heart, the movement of the heart is called mind. Yes. Right. So that’s why in the New Testament, they call it a. That’s Old Testament, they call it a still small voice. Christians also refer to it as not your heart, as in there’s other places in the New and Old Testament where your heart is referred to as this kind of fickle emotional thing, which you know, and in Chinese medicine, too, the heart is very subject to its emotions. Right. They say that in the da Tejing, they say that the flavors dull the tastes and colors dull the vision. Right? So there’s that heart, which is this heart, this kind of, like, for lack of a better word, like feeble emotionality. And then there’s a different kind of emotionality, which is all arises from a deep desire to connect, the will to connect. Yeah. And to love and to be free, which has its root in a kind of stillness, a kind of unity. That’s the desire which is most powerful. So you can sit there and you can do your sigils and things. It doesn’t have to do with the sigil. It doesn’t have to do with the incantation, doesn’t have to do with the manifestations. You know, how people are doing. You know, the water trick, the manifestation, like you, you put one, you imprint one energy on a. You do this one and you transform it and you drink it, and it’s like, that’s powerful shit. But what’s most powerful about it is your new age manifestation techniques. What’s most powerful about them is your belief about what’s happening, allowing you to truly feel the desire which is in you to have or be the thing. Yeah. Because again, it’s this dual nature of the heart, which has both this internal aspect and, in a way, external. The external aspect being the emotions that are there that are, you know, shaking your. Your chi, your. All the channels are. That’s right. And then you have Chinese medicine. Yeah. And then you have the internal aspect of the heart, which is what you’re talking about, which is more the quiet aspect, fantastic, which is actually connecting to, if we go back to our black holes, at the center of everything. The heart, in a way, is the organ which is most connected to this field. I love it. That encompasses everything. Amen, bro. And there’s this, you know, I was mind mapping this stuff. Yin and yang by the way of the heart. The yin aspect being the more emotional, kind of connected to the body. And the yang aspect being connected inwards. And yin is manifest. It has substance, materiality, core. It’s central. Again, this manifest, this gradation between manifested and unmanifested earth in heaven, this gradation that exists in everything. Well, there’s a. I’ve mind mapped a lot of this stuff. I’m so surprised I didn’t pull it out and show it to you. My mind map. My mind map. But.