Evolution Through Chi (August 2011)

Zen training has a good deal in common with T’ai Chi Chih training because both Zen and TCC do not feel that words are important. Zen is a transmission without the benefit of words or doctrine, leading to seeing your own true nature. Of course, that could be said of TCC as well. It is true that you have to use words to communicate and you teach with words. But it is the circulation of the Chi, not the words, that brings about the changes.

We see the difficulty that’s going on in the Middle East now. When there is enough evolutionary force put in motion with TCC, things will be quite different and I think you’ll see the role that TCC is going to play.

Now Huang-Po was one of the greatest Zen teachers and he was the teacher of Rinzai, who was also known as Lin Chi. His Rinzai Zen is probably in ascendancy today, as the number one Zen sect or type of teaching in the world. Now Huang-Po said, “I would say that if you attain realization in the exercise of the Chi you will occupy the pinnacle of attainment and will allow not even the Holy Ones to spy on you.” If you attain your satori, if you attain your kensho, your great realization, through the exercise of the Chi, you will occupy the pinnacle of attainment.

D. T. Suzuki, who recently made Zen popular in the West, said, “At the moment of enlightenment there is a complete revulsion of the prana.” (Prana is Sanskrit for Chi.) That’s a tremendous statement because you can work that backward: “With the moment of enlightenment there is a complete revulsion of the Chi.” But how about saying: “Where there is a complete revulsion of the Chi, there is the moment of complete enlightenment?” I think that shows you where your practice takes you. …

The great metaphysical mystery is that all the time that we are evolving, nothing is changing. At one level, there is no change. That’s the level of the “uncarved block.” But at the level that we live everyday, we are changing, and we are changing rapidly. Some are changing more rapidly than others. We are all evolving, and we are all evolving, according to Gopi Krishna, to a very high spiritual state in which eventually this earth will be a paradise. Some of these statements of his are all leading in one direction. I picked them out for that reason: All have to do with TCC practice.

He says, “The religious impulse is an expression of the evolutionary force in human beings. Kundalini (kundalini and chi are the same thing) is not a metaphysical force. It should be understood as a psycho-physiological operation of body.” This corresponds very strongly to what my teacher in India used to say: “For every spiritual change there is a physical change. For every physical change there is a spiritual change.” He said that, “The good (we use the words good and bad quite loosely) is that which aids evolution. That which forwards evolution is the good.” …

We are in a constant state of purification. This corresponds very closely to what happens in music. We have dissonance; we set up a dissonance and then we resolve the dissonance and there is a feeling of rest. It’s also true in good painting and in all fields of the arts. Life is a matter of expansion/contraction, dissonance/consonance. Or if you prefer, a state of ill-ease, un-ease, dis-ease. This disease then becomes ease; it then comes back to a pure state.

Gopi Krishna says that “it is only when the brain is fed by this radiant psychic energy (psychic energy is what he calls prana or chi) that the otherwise impenetrable realm of consciousness becomes perceptible to the inner vision.” He is saying that one day we may view the entire realm of Consciousness! Many of the greatest thinkers have said, “There is nothing but consciousness.” Yogacara Buddhism says “Consciousness only.” And Gopi Krishna says, “The world that we observe with our senses is very small, very limited. But the inner realm (which is not only inner) of consciousness is unlimited.”

He had a feeling (all through the last forty years of his life) of swimming through this vast ocean of consciousness. So he says, “It is only when the brain is fed by this radiant psychic energy that the otherwise impenetrable realm of consciousness becomes perceptible to the inner vision.” He says, “The human brain can rise to higher states of consciousness by certain biological readjustments in which the cerebral-spinal system plays a decisive part.” You don’t have to know all this in order to do TCC. But now you know what you are working with in TCC. …

Excerpted and reprinted with permission from Good Karma Publishing. Available as a booklet through the New Mexico T’ai Chi Chih Association for a small fee (tel 505-299-2095), or as a free e-book downloadable on http://www.gkpub.com/talks.php.