In the Western intellectual mind, individualistic conflict is the essence of human life. For instance, in Spenglar’s view the classical Western (Apollonian) man has no soul but “rests the eternal light of the transparent southern day” like the perfect marble statue under the shadow of brutal catastrophe threatening from the outside. Whereas for the Chinese, in Hegel’s view, people “cherish the meanest opinion of themselves, and believe that men are born only to drag the car of Imperial Power.” “The burden which presses them to the ground, seems to them to be their inevitable destiny: and it appears nothing terrible to them to sell themselves as slaves, and to eat the bitter bread of slavery.” Hegel consigned the Chinese permanently to their space outside the development of the World Spirit since the early 1800s.

Nevertheless, what Hegel consigned the Chinese to their “meanest opinion of themselves” was the Confucian “middle way” that was carried out and viewed from different times and angles. The question is what is Confucianism is really about? Or how much a non-Chinese, or anyone can really understand it without the cultural context and practice? At any rate, Confucius was a very profound and complicated figure so is his teaching and thought. The increasingly outstanding Western scholars take this view today, Herbert Fingarette, the Confucius expert says “Confucius as secular (pragmatic and ethical) as sacred (magical and shamanistic),” whereas the Harvard Chinese intellectual historian Benjamin Schwartz says Confucius’ “role as teacher that establishes his unique position in the history of Chinese civilization. Confucius’ unique dominance as a ‘cultural hero’ is truly exceptional, since there are no exact parallels in any other ancient civilizations, although one can find parallels in specific religious traditions, such as Buddhism and Christianity.”

To make the long story short, Confucius’s entire teaching can be summed up in one sentence: “Don’t give up your ideal but don’t fight the impossible, the most impossible thing to fight is the natural, thus humans have to live together orderly to be happy.” So the Chinese constantly tried to compromise themselves to the natural in the past. Man compromises to nature, Man compromises to man. You don’t speak disrespectful words to your parents or elders because you will be punished. You’re punished not because you did an inappropriate thing but because you are out of the Order. You deconstruct the connection that is built to connect the inner space with the outer space. The Order, or the connection is the same, often described as the “Way of Heaven” and the “Ethic of Man.” Confucius specifies the Order by two main ideas, one as Li or Ritual and rite, which is ceremonies associated with sacrifice to ancestors and deities of various types, social and political institutions, and the etiquette of daily behavior. The other Confucius’s idea is Ren or Benevolence or Goodness, which is the virtue of perfectly fulfilling one’s responsibilities toward others. These ideas were believed to have originated from the heavens. To protect the Order, the Chinese even scarified their technological advancements in the earliest time. For the same reason, they closed all of their seaports when they had the means and power to dominate the ocean for trading and military expansionism in the early 1400s. In many cases, the Chinese almost believed that they had dissolved the gap between the inner space and the outer space.

In the West, on the other hand, people have taken a completely different path. We, the humans have become the Masters of Nature—of everything—so what have we done? We have conquered, we have taken over, and we have utilized every possible thing and way for profit. Based on this model of the Western culture, typically commercial and military expansionism, the first thing we do is to expand our trading to get profit. I’m going to trade with you: you sell a thing to me and I sell a thing to you on the fair ground, so we are all happy. But the truth is it can never be fair, if it’s really fair then there is no more trading. The very essence of trading is unfair; someone is always going to get more profit, that’s the whole idea that makes trading go. If everybody is so fair the trading stops.

When trading goes to a degree, we can’t trade anymore, what do we do then? We reinforce trading with our military power. You don’t want to trade with us anymore? How about we send some warships and war plans to your sea and your air, we bomb your towns, we bomb your country, how about that? This is not a joke—this has happened over and over—the biggest event was the 1840’s Opium War in China. The British grew opium in India and sold it in China, when China refused it, the British responded with war. The most recent ones, we just bombed the hell out of Vietnam, Persian Golf, and Iraq, for the same idea, different reasons. This is the Cultural Pattern. It’s not that Bush was bad, Bush was innocent. He was doing it because he was following the culture, the philosophy, and the deeply rooted patterns. Bush was just doing his job. It’s not him, but the system and the cultural practice. We have to do it because we don’t know other ways.

In so doing we are in trouble now. Everything seems to be falling apart, but we say well, we’re falling apart because we have to many debts, and we have too many bad deals. We didn’t do this thing right, so if we do it this way or that way, then everything will be solved, we’ll be good. But we’re never going to make it right. We can’t make it right, we have developed so far on this path to it’s peak. We have already maxed out, that’s it, it’s over, completely done. We continue this way, the harder we try, the worse it gets. We can’t see it yet, but we will see in the next few years. But that’s not our concern here; our concern is that you need to see this, this problem, this everlasting battle, the eternal fight.

You fight, and you may say by now, I see, I’m very egotistic that’s why I fight. No, actually that’s not it. You fight because you deeply recognize that you are cut off from the Order. Your inner space is never connected with the outer space; therefore you are crammed with fear, insecurity, and death, and that’s why you fight. It’s not the ego, the ego is just a term we use, but it’s the deep connection that is gone. That’s why we all fight.

How can’t we fix this? If what I’m saying is all right, we have to re-evaluate and recognize the spaces—the inner space the outer space—we have to go from there. We have to look at it from the very simple and practical view of life. Let’s put it in a simple way: You don’t have to be an expert of anthropology or archeology to see this. When the first humans gained a sense of difference between themselves from animals—whether you believe in genesis or in evolution—it really doesn’t matter because there was some point humans recognized that they were superior to animals. What did they do after that?

You establish a space: you build shelters/caves, the animals do not build, animals only live in shelters/caves. You advance your buildings, so your shelters/caves begin to develop. That’s where your gardening and your architecture begin, which also separate you from animals completely. When you build your shelters, you will cultivate gardens nearby. You need to grow things so that you feed yourself besides picking wild fruits and killing animals. This is where everything starts, gardening and sheltering, they always stay together. To this very day, when you have a house what do you do? You will have a garden whether it’s a piece of lawn in front of your house, or you grow some tomatoes in your backyard. It’s a garden, and you need a garden. This is a primitive, very original idea. Its not something new, its not that we are so developed industrially or technologically that we have to love nature again because we have gone too far from nature by our advancement, we need to create some gardens (or hiking and camping in the nature) next to our buildings. Or like the Japanese, the Chinese, they are more meditative peoples, they create gardens so that they are more peaceful and spiritual. No that is not what it is. It’s from very beginning, the first human instinct: gardening and shelter. (to be continued…)

Tags: ego, fighting, individuality, Inner Space, meditation, spirituality, western culture

Part Two

If we look at the last 5000 years of our history as history—not the history of the great chains of great events, or the ideas of events—if we only take a minute-break from our focusing on the eventful, we may find ourselves still in the exactly same, somewhat exasperating position: we seem to have a hard time to manage the simplest things right—eat, sleep, and poop!

Here is the very question, most of you come to me for meditation, but what are we really trying to do?  You say, I’ve got a knee problem, I’ve got a back problem, and the constant emotional problem—whatever my boss says I get upset. So we meditate, it seems to be working. To a point, you say, I’ve been working with you for 5 years, how come I feel like I’m still in the same situation? Those problems are not as pronounced now, but I have some other problems. Those Things, they just don’t stop. Where is the end? How are we ever going to get somewhere?

You question is good, but at the same time, not even a question. There is a problem here with all of us—it is the disparity, a gap between our inner space and our outer space. There is the internal space and there is the external space. We are dropped in between these spaces since we were born. The inner space is all about “I” and my life, and the outer space is everything outside “I” and out side my life. The inner space distills, it gets tighter and tighter in the deepest mind and deepest emotions, and it is all about Self, it is only about myself regardless of anything or anybody else including my beloved ones.

Nevertheless, the inner space deceitfully expands with our life conditions. When you get married, your husband your wife your kids become a part of your inner space, which is closer to the center of Self than your relatives and your friends. You draw the lines among these and you team them. Everything channels to the center, Self, and everything also reacts back outwardly, whoever, whatever is more important to the center, Self, gets closer to you. The development—distilling and expanding—of your inner space depends on the effects of your reach and control, or understanding other than yourself. It is like throwing a rock in the pond, the ripples fad away as the rock sinks. The very outside ripples seem to be beyond the reach and control, which we call it the outer space or external world since we have no control or understanding of it.

The only space now you have is the inner space. Your inner space colonizes and internalizes the outer space, which no longer does not exist nor it matters to you. The true fact is that your family, your job, your beloved ones, your beloved things, and the other humans all belong to the outer space. You Think that they are part of you thus in your inner space. Your mind convinces you that you and your wife or your husband have been married for 50 years, for that reason they are part of your inner space. Your Thinking is wrong; your thinking has nothing to do with the reality.

Why then they’re not in our inner space? Because we fight, we constantly fight. The little and tedious fights keep going on in our lives, day after day, hour after hour, we fight, and we fight within ourselves, or to be precise, I fight myself. We never stop fighting with ourselves because the disparity, the gap, the conflict makes us keep going. We have to fight to survive. We instinctively have to make the connection between the inner space and the outer space; we have to close the unbearable gap. We believe that only the fighting can close the disparity. We still live in the Faustian world after 1000 years, because we still see ourselves as a force endlessly combating obstacles in the infinite space. Conflict is the essence of our existence. Yes, we do stop fighting once a while, we stop the fighting temporarily when the gap comes closer, and things become more harmonized with us, which we believe was achieved by our ferocious fighting. Soon as things become less harmonized—things always become less much less harmonized no matter how much we have achieved—we continue to fight again.

There we go, we fight with ourselves and we fight with whomever is with us. We fight as an individual, a marriage, a household, a neighborhood, a community, a state, a nation, and after that we fight as the planet earth. After that we’re suppose to attack anything that comes out of outer space, UFO or something like that, and we seriously wonder if we have the weaponries when these things come to attack us? Because they are so different from us, it’s a kind of different battle we will have to prepare. People are really serious about this sort of thing. But we don’t seem to see that this whole thing starts within ourselves, with each INDIVIDUAL deeply in ONESELF. Once we can stop the fight deeply in ourselves the whole thing stops. There will be no more threat of war, economy or military from China or Russia, or from anywhere, even outer space.

Sadly enough, this whole thing is created by oneself. As long as we keep fighting in our inner space, the fighting expands and amplifies. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger. We can’t stop this fight because we fight ourselves. It’s like this—you get up in the morning, feel good about yourself, then something happens to you—someone says or does something to you, so you feel this way or that way, you even believe that you have become this way or that way. Now what are you going to do about it? Of course, you react, so you fight back. You can resolve that and you can just stop there so that everything will be fine, but most likely you can’t stop there, because someone said something or did something to you. You now have to initiate the everlasting holy war, you just have to keep fighting to a point until things are resolved (at least in your mind). You stop temporarily, and then you continue to your next fight because when you move on, someone will say or do something to you again. So everything IS about fighting, you keep fighting.

You look at it, why do you keep fighting? Because you always feel like you are right, if you’re not right then you are innocent. You just feel that even I’m wrong but I’m innocent, so if I’m innocent, which grants me my Rights, my Individuality, something I am entitled to since I was born, thus I can not be treated this way. That’s what happens. It’s not about your mental or emotional problems, or you’re a disturbed person, something wrong with you, or something wrong with the other person, it’s Your Rights, Your Individuality, which forms and sustains your deep inner space, cuts you off from the outer space, the Connection is completely cut off, as long as you only see your Rights or Individuality.

Consequently, the ultimate fight deep within us is not about fighting with your wife or with your husband or whoever’s in front of you, it’s about fighting yourself because you try to connect your inner space to the outer space in order to get the Harmony or the Unity. Once you get the Harmony or the Unity, the world becomes peaceful and safe. As long as this connection is cut you don’t feel safe. Then you keep fighting. The way of your fighting is your way to bridge this connection, that’s why you keep fighting. You don’t know or think that there may be another way to connect the disparity, or the gap so you keep fighting (to be continued).

Part One

This book is called the Decline of the West, written by the German philosopher and historian Oswald Spenglar (1880-1936). I picked up this book almost 20 years ago when I lived in San Francisco. I was drawn by the title and wondering: everything is so great what is declining? In the last few weeks, I started reading it again.

Spenglar proposed two destiny ideas for the first time: the Apollonian of the classical world and Faustian of the modern world in the West. Apollo is variously recognized as a god of light and the sun, truth and prophecy, archery, medicine, healing and plague, music, poetry, and arts etc. Whereas Faust, a highly successful scholar, is unsatisfied, and makes a deal with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Apollonian man conceived of his soul as “the cosmos or well ordered aggregate of all near and completely viewable things.” There was no place in his universe for will, and there was no place for inward conflict and development of personality. According to Spenglar, Apollonian man has no soul but “rests the eternal light of the transparent southern day” like the perfect marble statue under the shadow of brutal catastrophe threatening from the outside. On the other hand, Faustian man sees himself as a force endlessly combating obstacles in the infinite space. Conflict is the essence of existence. Personal life has no meaning without it. Says Spenglar: “Here is heralded the color of Rembrandt and the instrumentation of Beethoven—here infinite solitude is felt as the home of the Faustian soul… Hamlet, Faust, are the loneliest heroes in all the Cultures.”

This is something that attracts my attention—it’s the infinite space—what Spenglar expresses as the infinite space is an inner space. So he’s saying that the modern people have an infinite inner space, and the feature of the inner space is the endless conflict, the struggle within humans. Because of this struggle humans started to see things differently, and with different depths and meanings. According to Spenglar, the classical world didn’t recognize that. So the classical world lived in the harmony but the problem with it was that it was like a statue with no real life. Whereas the modern world lives in the everlasting struggle—internal struggles—he uses the lines from The Easter scene of Faust I to illustrate how our modern heroic people infinitely felt: “A longing pure and not to be described/ drove me to wander over woods and fields/ and in a mist of hot abundant tears/ I felt a world arise and live for me.”

Famous lines, the idea is about modern people’s inner struggle and inner search. When you really read those lines, you see that everything is about individualism, very poetic, but at the same time, it is all about separation and isolation, It’s a delusion, if you really read it: “in a midst of hot abundant tears/ I felt a world arise and live for me.” The world is always there—it never rises for you or for anybody else—the truth is the world does not concern you. You try it out. You get sick—you can’t go out for a year—you see if anybody or anything is going to care about that, I mean really care about it, not to mention if you die. You think the world is going to care about that? Or you are really going to think because you have this passion, so the world is going to become more vivid for you? of course not, it does not concern you, nor has much to do with you.

This is the ultimate problem with the later model of Western culture. Basically it’s self-indulgence. It’s an egotistic drive of delusion. How many times in your life you have this type of experience; you are sitting there, looking at this plant, and all of a sudden the sun drops in from the window, you see all the different shades of light and the shadows on the plant. Because everything is fine with you now, you have no problem with your wife or husband or children or job, and you are looking at that and you know its 7 o’clock in the evening and you say it’s so beautiful, it’s so peaceful, this world is so great. Two weeks later, you had a bad day, bad day at work, big fight with your wife, husband, whoever, and you sit in the same spot and you look at the plant in the exactly or almost exactly same light, and you are going to say: this is dreadful, depressing, horrible, now this world is over.

When you get those two completely different perceptions from the same environment and same moment, it only tells you that it’s all about you. The plant does not care whichever the way it may be—it is you who impose your inner self whatever that is whether a delusion or a reality—you impose it to the plant, and thus you live in a delusion by your imposing. That’s the essential problem with the Faustian cultural model. You may say that we are in the 21st century and the Faustian modern world was over 1000 years ago, it is too far from us. But it’s really not too far; it’s still within us. We have developed all the great Wonders during the last 100 years; we think we’re so advanced from all the old worlds, which we are actually not. We still live in the same way, we still think the same way. (to be continued)

Qi Gong techniques are also divided into two general categories: dong gong, or dynamic qi gong, and jing gong, or meditative qi gong. Dynamic qi gong includes physical movements. The entire body moves from one posture to another or a posture is held while the four limbs move through various positions. Tai Chi is an example of a dynamic qi gong, juxtaposed with meditative qi gong, where the entire body is still, and the qi is controlled by mental concentration, visualization, and precise methods of breathing.