Ch'i

We might want to use a Chinese term to describe what is not normally accepted as 'real' in Western culture only because it cannot be quantified. But we do not have to accept all aspects of the Chinese term as it would be expressed in Chinese culture. It is just that this alien word (to Westerners) may be the best that we have to hand. I use Ch'i rather than Qi deliberately. Qi is the genuine Chinese article whereas I have appropriated the word Ch'i for Western use precisely because it has been rejected in China. 

This is not the same thing as, say, the Way of Wyrd. Wyrd is more implicitly directed by the Fates or Norns or Odin or some active force in Nature (as you would expect amongst Westerners) whereas the Dao, of which Qi is a manifestation, is a flow without direction, just a constant balancing of opposites. My Ch'i (as opposed to Wyrd or Qi) is not dissimilar from Orgone, another more modern variant on the theme, and is a monist materialist concept. In the end, you either sense it in yourself or you don't and, if you don't, so be it.

This is not to assume a Western vitalism. There is no reason to suppose that Ch'i does not have a material base albeit one that might change our perception of matter. Nor does it necessarily arise outside of ourselves or be connected to the world as a force that is greater than ourselves. It is probable (we think certain) that there are many individuals with Ch'i rather than a great Ch'i in which all individuals participate. The Ch'i gives out an illusory image of the universal (a theme of our Tantra series) because, since Ch'i exists here and there, evolved materially within us as individuals as our life force, then that Ch'i and this Ch'i (it is believed) must be connected so that evolution itself and the world possess Ch'i. There is no necessity in this 'leap of faith'.

This fallacy is an attractive alternative to God but it is not just that it cannot be evidenced (neither can God) but, as we say, it is not necessary. All the Ch'i we need is obtainable within us and in the relationship of ourselves to our environment and those closest to us. High emotion is Ch'i. Detachment is Ch'i. Desire is Ch'i. Withdrawal is Ch'i. The myth of universalism may be socially useful and comforting but not only is it not necessarily true but it threatens to overwhem the life force within us, our own Ch'i, by immersing it in nature or in the 'divine' or in the social as a form of loss of self that is little more than death before its time. To kill the integrated mind-body 'ego' is to kill the person without benefit other than a lifting of current and often creative anxieties.

Ch'i is an individual's vital energy, necessary for action, managed by a well-integrated will. The Ch'i of an individual can be degraded by negative external forces (including the death instinct) - by poor environment and the actions of others above all but also through a failure of will. Thus we do not have to become essentialist or animist in presuming some universal Ch'i at all. We can see Ch'i developing in us and our predecessors throughout the evolutionary process - on a path where we, humans, may be the terminus or mere staging post to something trans-human with even more energy than we have. We may want to assume that part of our individual mission is to enhance the Ch'i of others.

The cultivation of one's own Ch'i is a life's work. There is wisdom in seeing it as malleable to one's state in time, an elderly and mature Ch'i is different in quality, though not more valued, than a young and vibrant Ch'i. The old seek the vibrancy of the young but the young trade this for the experience of the mature. Ch'i also spreads out from the individual or it can be drawn in. Its influence is its glamour or its charisma. Its expressions are imagination and desire as well as brute power. It is moral not because it is required to be moral by the universal or the social but because it becomes absurd to be cruel and greedy. Bankers, bureaucrats and lawyers rarely have good Ch'i but it is not impossible that they might.

The body has a Ch'i that is both mental and physical. Good health represents the balance and flow between the mental and the physical. If you are ill and it is not absolutely organic, something is blocking your Ch'i or you are out of balance and have insufficient Ch'i or your Ch'i is being exhausted by external forces. Only you can know what you require - including outside help. Medicine here is the search for that which externally can restore Ch'i and internally restore balance. In this sense, we have much to learn from radical Western and from Eastern cultures evemn if we would be fools to abandon modern science when it comes to organic crises and failures. Ch'i may be physical or mental in its aspects but in its totality it cannot be divorced from the body or be operative without a mind.

There is no shame in categorising Ch'i medicine as 'placebo' or as complementary to more obviously materialist organic and psychotherapeutic methods. Ch'i is a third pre-emptive base line of health alongside those lines requiring organic and psychotherapeutic expertise. Ch'i is also a benign environmental solipsism. The world's aesthetic beauty and calm becomes an extension of oneself and returns to heal the inner self, adding force to Ch'i. Good Ch'i affects desire for the world, moderating it to what is most central to the person and enables a measured acquisition of goods - not only health but wealth, energy and luck.

A person aware of their own Ch'i constructs a safe and secure environment for itself without body armour against others or indulging its own fears and anxieties by choosing the death-options of religion, addiction or intellectualism. A Feng Shui mentality is not magic but an alignment of the perceiving mind with environmental reality. A Feng Shui of society does the same task by placing all persons in alignment with their Ch'i. There is no English word for this thing, this being-in-relation-to-the-world which cannot be reduced to matter in our understanding yet is ultimately part of the material base of an integrated mind-body. It is beyond science but also greater than spirit or mind. It is the existing of ourselves.

A 'Sick' Society - What It Really Means ...

Managing the self as both body and mind, where both have an influence on each other, where both have significant unconscious aspects and where both are dependent on external inputs (such as nutritional on the one side or perceptual on the other) is an art and not a science. It takes place in real time with multiple changes in many components. If, as physicians have suggested, severe stress results in atrophy of the hippocampus and this reduces the memory resources available to allow the body to react appropriately to future stress, this has consequences.

It means that we must engineer our environment (which includes society) to avoid severe stress and we must seek means to engineer our bodies to recover from past severe stress so that they can deal with current and future stress. A degree of social engineering and a degree of corrective personal engineering may be necessary to enable us to live the good life and to make informed decisions about preserving it, but the choice of what constitutes the good life always remains an individual and not a social one.

Social or bodily engineering that creates stress or is non-consensual or is imposed from without (except under the most extreme of diseased or psychotic conditions) is counter-productive. There is a point of balance at which most people most of the time will have to accept their 'difference' from the normal as ‘just who they are’. Take the range of mental issues created by dysfunctionality of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis [HPA axis]: anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, insomnia, post-traumatic stress, borderline personality disorder, ADHD, deep depression, burnout, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel and addiction.

The decision on where these issues are dysfunctional is too often a social one and not an individual one. The social often imposes the very demands on the body that result in the mental problem and then the social, instead of changing its own practices, seeks its own solution to a problem that it created. As a result, and this applies across social policy to issues of social exploitation and abuse, instead of a serious problem of painful dysfunction being dealt with under conditions of personal care for a relatively few, large numbers of people divert skilled time into patching up so that people can go back into battle.

Much of modern psychological medicine has degenerated into a form of ‘normalisation’ and into a castigation by implication of 'difference'. This has happened, as in social policy, because a large class of persons can only get a living and meaning from acting as definers of others. We all see the absurdity of a doctor working through the night to save the life of a man who is to be executed next morning. At least the patching up of warriors and workers has the cynical social purpose of defending the system or keeping its economic wheels turning but, today, we are in a different condition again.

Mass health and social services provision has created a half-baked world where a vast class of persons exists to maintain people whose trauma and miseries are real enough but are as likely to be created by social circumstances, poor nutrition and crowded conditions as they are by something organic. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, our economic structures now depend on an industry of helpers and a vast mass of persons who must be helped. They do not rely on strong, willful, self-reliant individuals in a position to intevene directly to support the weakest members of the community - we drive the vulnerable into a 'system'.

The sheer scale of the resources required to maintain this system means that the socially isolated and the psycho-somatically ill are increasingly taking resources from the minority who badly need short term sustained intensive help. These last just fall into the mass - the helped - to add more customers for the growing class of helpers. The height of absurdity is reached when our entire culture becomes geared to helping those who appear to need to help by hiring them as helpers ('full employment'), a worthwhile palliative up to a point but one which, in effect, simply accepts that the way we conduct our social affairs should be 'normalised' as a shared 'lesser misery'.

The poverty of aspiration is staggering. The height of our aspiration is now that everyone has a 'job', a functioning role in a dysfunctional system. Nobody appears to be able to consider how the system might be made more functional - perhaps everyone just accepts that it cannot in a form of conservative pessimism that has merely been re-labeled ‘progressive’. Worse, this conservative pessimism on the 'official' Left (which is now the ruling order regardless of party) must bring everyone under the same health and welfare model. No matter that placebos, shamans and herbal medicines might actually reduce demand on the system. These must always be avoided in favour of more expensive interventions (although we re-assert here the absolute primacy of scientific medecine).

Herbal medicines almost certainly regulate the HPA system and, under experienced guidance, can be made to accord with individual body chemistries. The placebo effect may offend rationalists but works - and if it works, why not embrace it pragmatically? Our concern should only be that people do not use alternative self-medication in preference to scientific medication but only to supplement and self-treat in the grey area between serious dysfunction and apparent health. The truth is that a purely scientific approach to the body-mind continuum is not truly scientific when dealing with most needs most of the time - as opposed to serious need some of the time. It is an ideology of rational intervention that has reached its lowest point with the recent bureaucratic interference by the EU to ban the use of herbal substances as ‘untested’. If the fear is that people will believe the local witch can cure cancer, then the fear is justified but if the fear is that people will choose minor irrationalities that offend the sensibilities of rationalists, then the fear is neurotic - and, oddly, irrational.

This ideology of excessive mass scientific interventionism, as opposed to precautionary advice on nutrition, exercise and mental health based on treating people not as children but as autonomous adults, is the last gasp of an over-simplified scientific materialism and it deserves underground resistance at every level. The real reason why this ideology is dominant is because we are talking here about economics and power and not about any real concern for the self development and empowerment of those autonomous individuals.

Welfare systems arose out of real need - the sort of need that still exists in much of the emerging world. Unfortunately, like roads, the solution creates more demand. Because basic care and emergency intervention required taxation, the class interest of the public sector and the need to keep the taxpaying majority supportive came to meant that 'universalism' spread services widely instead of where they were needed most. Hence the anomaly of a massive, expensive and unnecessary child benefits system in place while over a 1,000 kids in a rotten English borough faced appalling sexual abuse because the resources of time and money were not there to protect them.

As demand and expense has increased, the subsequent and necessary 'cutting' process has meant that the same services are just more thinly spread. There is a failure to invest in the wider social infrastructure that caused the stress-related illnesses in the first place and neglect of those who most need expensive but decisive intervention. We now have a grossly inflated public sector whose politics are a deadweight on the economy and on our culture, enforced 'cuts' which harm those in most dire need for political reasons and a grossly dysfunctional social structure that drives psychological and psychosomatic illness.

And what is at the heart of this degraded system in which the 'official' Left is fully complicit? Scientists have found evidence to suggest that social subordination leads to chronic stress - the subordinated are less aggressive, less in control of themselves and constantly anxious about dominant others in our own species. Does this not sound familiar? We have a culture that is ostensibly free but one in which there is no connection between the mass and political decision-making, in which the economy is volatile and dependent on 'global factors' and where most wealth and power trickles down from a tiny group at the top of our tree. We may as well be apes.

And the consequences of this widespread social subordination is chronic stress, expressed as psychosomatic illness and neurosis but also as a lack of engagement in the local community or in enterprise, as addictive behaviour and impulsiveness (especially with bank credit before 2008) and as cynicism. Our politicians are obsessed with grandstanding overseas (apparently we are diminished in the eyes of some Parliamentarians because our Prime Minister is not grandstanding in Kiev instead of worrying about Rotherham), process and keeping the busted system ticking over but none of them understands the central problem of our time - how to return a sense of power and meaning to the people they clearly despise in their hearts or see just as fodder for their own drive to have the power to 'do good' at them or for them instead of with them.

Given our conditions, our problem is not that we are too aggressive as a population but that we are not aggressive enough. Every now and then, some extreme case of violence (such as Raoul Moat, the Ipswich serial killer or gun-killings in South London) creates a surge of anxiety about the psychopaths in our midst but these are tiny events in a country of over 60 million people. What is far more worrying is that the vast bulk of our huge population simply takes the unutterable amount of ordure heaped on them by incompetent governors and experts without protest - and then goes home, gets sick and thanks the system for treating them for the disease the system brought on them in the first place. We are back to the world of Milgram. The few who can capture the machine, the alpha apes, can command millions ... and that should really worry and depress us.