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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy: T'ai Chi |
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Tai Chi and "Beating Butterflies Wings vs. HURRICANES"
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by Bill Douglas |
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A Tai Chi master once walked through a spider's web in the woods with a student. The student exclaimed in disgust the reality of it. The master asked the student if he could tell how many strands were in the web they'd walked through. The master explained that this was the essence of Tai Chi. "Subtlety" is what the master was talking about, that Tai Chi is a study in the achievement of an ever deeper subtlety of awareness.
Chaos mathematicians have a fascinating metaphor to describe the study of their new science of subtely, which is Chaos Mathematics. The image they offer is that when a butterfly beats its wings in Beijing, this may eventually roll into a series of events that form a hurricane in Florida. The idea is that horrible and massive events begin as very subtle events.
My twenty-five years of study of the Chinese mind / body sciences of Tai Chi and Qigong (Chi Kung), have helped me begin to see the beating butterfly wings, and the hurricanes in my own life's connection. By learning to see this evolution of events within, and beginning to understand the subtlety of internal dynamics, my life has become simpler, more powerful, tons more productive and abundant, and far more profound and interesting. I have many less hurricanes in my physicial life, because I'm willing to touch into the disturbances deep within at the earliest levels to begin to process them there before they manifest in external reality. Disturbances will become apparent, either on a subtle level within, or eventually in our face as dramatic physical world occurances. Which way we deal with them is up to us.
Humanity is reaching what I refer to as "graduation day" for our species. We have explored and often exploited every corner of the planet, and our burgeoning six billion people have inhabited virtually the entire globe to the point of its environment beginning to sag under the weight, and its resources dwindling under the constant needful strain of our species. Our world grows closer, tighter, and more immediate. The distance between internal butterfly wings beating and physical world hurricanes is growing more and more instantaneous. This reality has brought humanity to its graduation day.
How does humanity graduate? You might ask. In order to graduate, and move forward with our collective lives we need to shift our perspective in a massive way. This paradigm shift will be about seeing how the subtle events become the hurricanes, BEFORE they become the hurricanes. Because when everything is stretched as thin and felt as immediately on our shrinking planet, there is less and less room to rebound back from catastrophic events. And, again, the distance between catastrophic events seems to be shrinking, and the line of possible events seems to be queuing up endlessly . . . unless we begin to find the subtle awareness of ourselves required to alter the beating of our butterfly wings.
The reality is, which is something years of Tai Chi and Qigong meditation have taught me, that the butterfly's beating wings are often at their core a flutter of my/our consciousness. I've learned that long before things become disasters or crisis in my own life, they began as a mind set that determined the course of my actions, and then that mindset was reflected back to me in the three dimensional reality of my life. Sounds familiar I bet. I think we're all beginning to see this pattern. It's been a very useful pattern for the first 50,000 years of human existence, teaching us valuable lessons in a crude, hard, physical kind of way.
However, as I mentioned, today's environment and society no longer allow us the luxury of awaiting every lesson to manifest as a physical reality. Our very existence is now demanding that our consciousness become more subtle, and more real, BEFORE the falling dominoes of cause and effect slam into our physical world. There is no escape. We have to look deeply into our mirror, and begin to truly know who we are, because what we are, is what our world is becoming at faster and faster speeds.
Bill Joy, the Chief Scientist for Sun Microsystems points out that the speed of human evolution is doubling exponentially every 18 months, and only getting faster and faster. He also asked, if we will blindly rely on technology to get us out of the messes we are creating, whether we'll simply stomp on the gas pedal of technological development and hope the answer will pop up. And with profound humility and wisdom, Bill Joy also asks, "should we slow down and begin to contemplate the direction we are going?"
Einstein once wrote, "We can never solve our problems with the same consciousness that created them." So, here we are, at graduation time, and our final exam as a species is "can we change our consciousness?"
Let's look at the most technologically advanced society in the world and use it as a miner's canary for the world. Miner's used canaries to learn if they were in a poisonous mine shaft, as the bird would collapse in time for the humans to still escape the bird's fate and survive by choosing another path. I do believe that we can mostly all still survive, if we begin acting rationally and subtly as soon as possible.
America, in this case the miner's canary, wields the most powerful military in the world, and the most powerful technology in the world. However . . . recently an act of nature leveled a city and will cost us hundreds of billions to repair. At the heart of this storm were some butterfly wings beating like mad, that had resulted in the Gulf of Mexico's temperature rising by 1 to 2 degrees, which had the effect of pouring gasoline on the fire that was Hurricane Katrina.
Many years ago a young governor of California, named Jerry Brown, and a President named Jimmy Carter, warned that it was time for a shift away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy. Brown trumpeted solar, wind, and new cutting edge energy saving technologies like replacing government face to face meeting, and their energy consuming travel, with a new technology called "tele-conferences." Young Governor Brown was quickly dubbed "Governor Moonbeam" by industries who's profits were threatened in the short term by his policies, and the public thought that was cute, to make fun of someone with a nifty name like that, so Brown's vision was submerged in the inanity that is our political media. President Carter's visionary tax cuts for home solar energy systems was decimated when he left office.
And now we are reaping the benefits of decades of spewing CO2 into the atmosphere which is heating our planet, in the form of superpowered hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. Initial estimates are approaching 200 billion dollars for the repair of New Orleans alone, and this will not even address the lowland, eroding levy issues that need to be addressed to stop future floods. That project will exceed one hundred billion dollars. And this will likely only be a glimmer of the future as the planet continues to be warmed by our energy policy. In the words of one climatic scientist on Tim Russert's Sunday Morning talk show recently, "New Orleans, is a vision of the future for every coastal city on the planet, as global warming causes ocean levels to rise 3 to 4 feet, as ice caps continue to melt at an alarming rate."
Let me describe another set of butterfly wings beating into a current storm.
About 50 years ago, we (the CIA) overthrew a stable elected democracy in Iran, illegally removing Mohammed Mossedegh, and installing a dictator, the Shaw of Iran. This dictator we installed ruled with an iron fist and imprisoned thousands of Iranians, and executed thousands more. Virtually no Iranian family was untouched by the criminal acts our CIA had perpetrated at the behest largely of a petroleum industry who was upset because the Iranians had elected a President who wanted his people to have a greater share in the oil being pumped from their homeland. The Iranians understandably resented us for many years, because of the way our CIA had decimated their democracy, and redistributed their oil in the West's favor. So much so that eventually the people of Iran staged a revolution, and installed the Ayatollah Khomeini as their revolutionary leader who held some Americans hostage because of what had been done to Iran years before in America's name.
The butterfly's wings we'd beaten when we overthrew a Democracy in Iran years before, were taking on the force of a powerful gale, a gale that shocked Washington, who decided that they needed a counter balance to fundamentalist Islam in Iran that had resulted from our overthrowing their democracy earlier. So, our CIA felt that a young strongman, who was very secular, would be a good choice to lead neighboring Iraq. Therefore, our CIA fostered and nurtured the rise of this young man, named Saddam Hussein, into power in Iraq to counter balance the mess that had become Iraq.
A large part of Hussein's Iraq held Shiite Muslims who shared much in common with Iran's Shiite Muslims, and Washington feared them because they feared the wind's of revenge for what they'd done to Iran years before. Therefore when chemical precursor agents were shipped from America into Iraq for Saddam Hussein to use as chemical weapons, Washington did not stop them from being shipped to him. Also, Washington offered Hussein satellite images to help him target his fundamentalist enemies more effectively. Our U.S. envoy was dispatched to shake hands with Saddam even as he was gassing his own people, and the soldiers of Iran with what we'd provided him in assistance.
For some reason at some point the young strong man Washington had lifted to power in Iraq, was now dubbed a monster, for committing the same acts Washington had actually helped him commit years before. Now the "monster" had to be removed, and even though the world warned us not to beat those wings for fear of the winds it would generate, our weapons inspectors were ordered out, our ships sailed, our bombs dropped, water and electric grids were destroyed . . . and the hurricane began. Now, many billions of dollars are pouring into Iraq every month, just to hold back the tides of civil war, like a drowning man desperately treading water in a violent storm.
Let's look at more butterfly wings, because as we now know, that is the critical question, for once the hurricane hits it's all too overwhelming and hopeless. Prison corporations here in America, project future profits by looking at child illiteracy rates. Yes, that's right, because they know that the more ignorant children are, the more likely it is that they will end up in prison, and their profits will increase. We know that when children attend Head Start they are less likely to end up in prison and more likely to end up in college. We know that it costs nearly TWICE as much to send a young person to prison as it would to send that same young person to Harvard. Therefore, we know that there are cheap ways to affect the butterflies that are our children, before they become the expensive monsters that we imprison to contain the hurricanes that have become their hopeless lives. By fully funding Head Start, and pouring massive resources into creating state of the art education, research shows that we could eliminate prisons, and have more educated, productive, tax paying citizens.
Those who've practiced Tai Chi for years begin to realize that we get sick less and less often, for the regular cleansing of stress loads Tai Chi achieves bolsters the respiratory function, the circulatory and nervous system function, and ultimately our immune system function. The gentle beating of the butterfly wings of self awareness, stress cleansing, and physical massage and tissue toning that Tai Chi is, creates a set of dominoes falling that result in dramatically improved health down the line. We learn the inverse of the Chaos metaphor of coming hurricanes.
This same insight that Tai Chi, Qigong, Yoga, and other meditative sciences provide practitioners can be a model for the way we live as a community, a region, a nation, and a world. In fact this subtlety of awareness is the ONLY way we can graduate to the next level of humanity.
My prescience tells me that beautiful and endlessly hopeful possibilities lie just beyond our graduation to this level of awareness and existence. Becoming subtle is the doorway to abundance beyond and through imagination, and creativity that would blind us in our current state of mind with it's endless brilliance. The figs of hope and potential hang plump and pregnant on the vines of life, awaiting our consciousness to turn up to the bounty existence holds forth from many dimensions.
But, just as the avatars and prophets found, we will find too, that our answers will not be found in the pounding drums of battle, or the screed of the stock market, but rather . . . in the quiet of the wilderness of our minds. In the quiet places within we'll find our answers. Our nations will be healed, and our markets will become abundant from those subtle insights . . . but it is the quietude within that will enable our minds to relax open to the patterns and channels we can flow into our future on, more effortlessly, more powerfully, more humbly, and more subtlety.
Our decisions will become less dramatic, less forceful, less idiological, and less glorious . . . yet in the end powerful beyond our ability to even begin to imagine. Shhhhhhh . . . listen to the butterflies wings.
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Bill Douglas,
World T'ai Chi & Qigong Day Founder, and Author
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Bill Douglas is the author of the #1 most popular T'ai Chi book in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States.
He can be reached at smartaichi.com His work, called "visionary" by the world's top T'ai Chi experts, is entitled, "The Complete Idiot's Guide to T'ai Chi & Qigong."
Bill is also the presenter in Britain's #1 best selling T'ai Chi DVD, Anthology of T'ai Chi & Qigong: The Prescription for the Future, and author of the acclaimed inspiration book, The Amateur Parent - A Book on Life, Death, War & Peace, and Everything Else in the Universe. It is available at www.smartaichi.com, and at amazon.com.
Bill is also the Founder of World T'ai Chi & Qigong Day:
worldtaichiday.org
and World Healing Day:
worldhealingday.org
now celebrated annually in 80 countries and recognized by the United Nations World Health Organization for it's healing work.
He is a media source on a host of natural health, social, & environmental issues and has been interviewed and/or published by media worldwide, including The New York Times and The South China Morning Post.
smartaichi.com
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