Human intent as it affects health:

Human health largely comes down to the mind. Some Japanese Martial Arts are often criticized because they do not include elaborate moves or meditations to map the flow of the channels throughout the body. Instead, some of these systems rely on the Zen proposition that everything starts and stops from the mind. When the mind is stable and calm, the body will be likewise. Intent also is a function of the mind. Healthy intent leads one on a path of health.

What conclusions can you draw from Kiralian photography?

The only conclusion that I can draw if that it is really neat. It is suggestive, however, that we do have a body that is fundamentally different from the purely reductionistic, biologically defined body we learn about in science classes. I am fascinated by the existence of a penumbra remaining in the leaf where part of the leaf was removed. I think that this is stronger evidence supporting a rethinking about our natures. I wonder how long the penumbra remains after the portion of the leaf is removed?

Acupuncture as effective energy medicine:

One of the things I have really enjoyed is learning a true acupuncture system. For those of you conditioned to think of TCM as such a system, just know that most if not all the theories you learn in school, from diagnosis to pulse taking are all from the Chinese herbal tradition. Acupuncture pulse and diagnosis is different -- related, but different. Don't get me wrong, the stuff you learn in school is great, but it pertains mostly to herbal medicine. You will learn the points and a specific way to use them, but the theoretical underpinnings for using a specific point because it has functions A through D was based on a school of thought popular in the Tang Dynasty, and was not the predominant theory for most of Chinese History. It was chosen for TCM by the communist government because it is the most compatible with herbal medicine. Hmm, I am digressing.

Back to the topic. One of the most exciting things for me was to start doing a technique called contact needling -- where needles are place on the body, but not inserted into the skin. The tools I used are called Teishin (in Japanese or shi zhen in pinyin) and 30 gauge gold and sliver needles. In modern Chinese thought, much emphasis is placed on the arrival of Qi. Likewise in modern Japanese systems. However, in Chinese schools, the patient is supposed to feel the qi, while in Japanese schools the emphasis is on the practitioner feeling the qi. This difference stems from interpretation of the classics, which state that the arrival of qi is important, but doesn't state who should feel the qi. Regardless of the correctness of either position, I know that as soon as I was trained enough to start feeling the qi as a practitioner my acupuncture started to become alive -- both for me and for the patient. Treatments started being a dynamic interplay between my skills and the patient's energy. Instead of sticking needles in according to theories about points combinations I learned by wrote, I would come up with a working hypotheses, based on my theoretical understanding, then actually test those points and theories on the patient. Only when the patient's body checked out and responded favorably would I apply a needling techniques to points. I began to see the results right away, before I left the room with the patient, rather than having to wait until next treatment to see of my point selection for their should pain had been based on the correct assumptions.

I still have a lifetime to learn acupuncture, but I am sure that with this kind of dynamic interaction, I will always learn something and will never become bored.

Biophysics and Me

At first blush, I must say that I don't know how biophysics affects me. I may be looking the question the wrong way, but without seeing how it affects me, it is hard to write about this question. I looked up some of the prominent Biophysicists and their work and the only person I recognized was Adolph Eugene Fick and his law of cardiac output. I somewhere remember my Anatomy teacher mentioning that somewhere in class. That said, I am sure that our technology has been greatly enhanced by the study of applying the laws of physics to the world of biology.

I know I'’m a living system because....…

We do like to ask the heady questions don't we. Life is a characteristic of cells and organismsisms on this planet. I know, or I assume at least, that I am composed of many, many cells working together to make up the organism which is me. Organisms must be carbon and wabasedseed and perform basic metabolistic functions, grow, respond to stimuli and can reproduce.

I am pretty sure that I fit the above criteria, so yup, I must be a living system.

Can I synthesize East & West?

Yes, from an eastern point of view, but not from a western point of view at least for the time being. One of the very interesting things about eastern thought generally its non-linearity or non-binary nature, when compared to western thought. Western logic holds that something cannot be A and not-A simultaneously. Either something is or it isn't. However, one of the things that caught my attention as I was first studying Chinese Medicine is how different theories were introduced and developed out of a sort of situational awareness matching the needs of the people at the time the theories were introduced. While it would be ignorant to say that there was no conflict between competing schools of thought as to the "rightness" or accuracy of different theories, over time the general concepts of the theories were gradually accepted, and practices alongside of each other - prominent examples include Five Phase and Zang Fu (Organ) Theory or the Five Transporting Points (Jing-well to He-sea) and 12 Channel Circulation theories. Each theory seems contradictory and the western mind will naturally want to either resolve the conflicts between the "competing" theories, or discover which theory is "right" or "better" than the other theory. Awhile back I ran into a now former teacher at our fine school who largely based his decision to stop teaching because he got tired of dealing with belligerent students, who rather than wanting to be taught, wanted to discuss, debate and argue the theoretical correctness of these different theories. I know that there were other factors as well, but inability of these students to shift their mind-set turned out to be the proverbial last straw. One of my favorite responses from a wizened teacher at this school, trained in China in Western Medicine and TCM is "can be". Sounds funny or imprecise from a western scientific point of view, but essentially, she is saying sometime A can be A, or A may not be A, depending on the circumstances.

So, the integration of eastern and western thought can be very successfully integrated, if one uses an Eastern lens through which to view the world.

My ePrime day:

I woke up this morning and got out of bed. Stumbled to the bathroom and took a shower.

I regained consciousness after what appeared to me to a period of time of 6.5 hours, during the period that the Sun does not shine on the earth at latitude 122.24W. I stood upright in the manner of other Bipedal life forms, which appear to ambulate in similar fashion as myself and moved from what I have accepted to be my place of sleeping (and watching prerecorded narratives, which are collectively assumed to be fictional on a digital playback apparatus) to the room where I perform various personal hygiene activities usually repeated one or more times a day. First, I placed paste manufactured for the purpose of removing the accumulation of the pale yellow or white biofilm on the mastication structures found in the jaws of many vertebrates on a long thin device with many short filaments clumped together at one end which is called a toothbrush by everyone I have meet who speaks the English language with some level of fluency. Then, I stood upright in front of a reflective panel, and moved the toothbrush back and forth over each mastication structure so that the short filaments appeared to be make contact with the teeth, thereby dislodging the white biofilm and (according to the profession charged with the care of such mastication structures) reduce the incidence of decay of the teeth. Next, I placed cloth coverings over my torso and limbs with the expectation that doing so would provide comfort and protection from what appeared to be me to be a cold morning. Almost always, I will ingest various carbohydrate, fat and protein substances for the purpose of obtaining the nutrition I have been told is necessary to sustain my physical and mental activities for the morning, but since the time measurement device displayed the numerals 8:15 AM upon my return to consciousness and the mutually agreed meeting time was at 9:00 AM, and I estimated that it would take the entire 45 minutes to arrive at the mutually agreed upon meeting place by the time each of our time measurement devices displayed 9:00 AM, so I chose to forgo the ingestion of any carbohydrates, proteins of fats.
Arrgggg.

Our "Energy Efficient" Culture

The irony of this question was not lost on me. Culturally, I find it interesting that we are obsessed with efficiency. When I was in my twenties, I read countless books on how to be successful and each devoted considerable time to new and better ways of being more efficient with time. In business, we always talk of doing more with less. And I love the new buzz about how the future is about selling less of more. Whatever the that means. With all the lip service about efficiency and management in our culture, we reallaren't't. How many people have more time than they did 10 years ago. From sustainablety standpoint, we would need the equivalent of five Earths to sustain the per capita consumption rates of one person in the United States. Yuk, that doesn't sound so efficient to me after all. http://www.footprintnetwork.org/webgraph/graphpage.php?country=usa
http://ecofoot.org/

Descartes has a lot to answer for!

Yes he does. One the one hand, Descartes' work paved the way for Newton and thus for much of the foundation of out modern world. He also set up the basic religious/scientific split that has been the cornerstone of Modern Western Medicine. Before I chose Chinese Medicine as a career, I had applied and been accepted to start a Clinical physiology Doctorate program. My reason for not matriculating was the realization that Descartes was wrong and the mind and body were in fact inseparable. I realized that if I went into a discipline based on Cartesian dualism, I would spend the rest of my career working to integrate the body and mind -- I felt like I would be one of the King's men working on Humpty Dumpty. Better to practice something with this integration as one of its basic principles.

Newton's Three Laws and Me.

First Law: Objects at rest remain at rest, and objects in motion remain in motion in a straight line at constant velocity. A force must be applied to change the state of motion of an object.

Second Law: The acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the forces acting on it. And inversely proportional to its mass.

Third Law: If two objects interact, say in a collision, the force exerted by object one on object two is matched by a force exerted by object two on object one of the same size, but in an opposite direction.

The world of Newton seems very familiar to me. First, my excellent education in the Utah Public Education System was largely based on the Newtonian paradigm. But also my cultural, familial and even religious paradigm seems to to fit largely into the Newtonian world. The historian Wallace Stegner (who was not a Mormon) stated that Mormonism was the first great American religion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Stegner With all the talk by people both inside and outside the Mormon Church about Mormons being different or peculiar from mainstream society, Mormon culture is at its core very Western/American and quite Newtonian in its approach and outlook.

One example of outlook is the value Mormons place on salvation by works. James 2:14 For those unfamiliar with Christian doctrine this stand ostensibly at odds with the Evangelical view that by the grace alone of Jesus is a person saved. http://www.leaderu.com/offices/michaeldavis/docs/Mormonism/salvation-refs.html Actually, I think that arguing one over the other is theological hair-splitting, but then that is a subject for another time. As such the goal for a Mormon is to "attain" Eternal Life, not by merely accepting Jesus as their personal savior, but by working hard though out their life to attain Eternal Life. And a Newtonian view of the world is used to help people obtain it. To restate Newton's laws in Mormon terms, a person in motion tends to stay in motion, and a person at rest tends to stay at rest. And force must be applied to change the state of motion of that person. The acceleration of a person towards or away from Eternal Life is directly proportional to the force acting on it, and inversely proportional to its mass. If two people interact, the force exerted by person one on person two is matched by a force exerted by object two on person one of the same size but in the opposite direction. Thus social interaction is structured to help people reach their goal. If a person is seen as having the right trajectory they are afforded more opportunities to continue on that trajectory at an equal or even an accelerated rate. This would come from "callings" to serve in the church, where they could lead and help others, following the first law. If a person were perceived as being on a trajectory taking them away from the goal, then interaction would be structured in terms of law three, and force (not in the common sense of physically retraining or physically forcing someone) and energy would be applied to redirect the trajectory of the person to a more constructive trajectory. This is one reason that a Mormon Mission is such a powerful force to help young people "turn their lives around." On this mission young men spend two years (women serve for 1.5 years) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mormon_missionary . During this time strict guidelines are followed about conduct, dress, speech, association and schedule as the young man or woman serves.

Science Experiment: Cat Dragging
I must admit that the idea of dragging my cat around on the carpet for school credit really appealed to me. As much as I would like to think that I received informed consent from my cat, the looks of betrayal and surprise unequivocally communicated otherwise. I ended up with three cat draggings, before she unilaterally ended the experiment. Each cat dragging was conducted at a different speed, from lowest to highest speed. Kitty seemed not to mind the low speed drag so much. Problem was that the faster the drag, the more exquisite the static electricity light show.

Chaos and Consciousness:
I found the reading on Poppers work very interesting: That the very essence of consciousness may be the result of the innumerable synaptic connections creating a sort of forcefield that integrates the information held in the vast matrix of neurons.

Fractals as patterns of complex systems:
Fractals as a particular manifestation of Chaos Theory are a mathematical representation of the systems that Chaos Theory attempts to study. I find it interesting how at each new level of the fractal it appears to replicate the pattern that appeared at a higher level, thus thus the quantum world must appear quite similar as our universe.

Ordered Chaos:
I have been cleaning out my garage this past week, within it lie the unseemly bits and pieces of my past. My inability to organize this area of my life reflective of my unwillingness, or god forbid, my inability to deal with my past. In spite of it all, it was damn torpedoes, full speed ahead. As I moved and through layers and layers of piles and boxes, I felt much like an archeologist, unearthing secretes and clues to the past in reverse chronological order. Old clothes in one pile, textbooks in another, financial and old electronics in yet another and another pile. Before long, each pile merged into one great pile, with electronics not predominantly making up the south part of the pile clothes the north, etc. Before long my pile -- or the order I was creating from the product of my cumulative laziness that had become my garage -- had grown to such magnitude that I it virtually precluded my ability to continue de-junking. This project has been a practical exercise in entropy and autopoesis.

It was neat to see the device in the before Detector article that actually can see the particles and antiparticles and to be able to see the tiny differences at the quantum level. The picture of the device also helped me to conceptualize that all this quantum particle stuff is all about.

My old Japanese teacher taught me that qi was energy and energy was qi. He would always say work from your Tan Den (Dan Tien) to harness your good energy while you treat people. I suppose that I see the two terms as more or less coterminous.

I do think that there is a relationship between personal and structural resonance. In class, we learned that any vibrating system resonates. One of the ways that I experience Qi is as vibrations, which form much of my concept of people as a system. Systems can be either animate or inanimate in the biological sense.

Are all vibrations good? Contrary to what one would believe after listening to the Beach Boys. I don't think that all vibrations are good, as demonstrated by the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster of 1940.

Connections between Sacred geometry and Physics:


Physics being the scientific study of how the world works and ancient representations of sacred geometry being prescientific representations of the same thing, one can say that connections exist between the two. The common point of each being nature. It then is not surprising that Fibonacchi's Golden Mean and Fractals reflect so completely so many natural phenomena. Phenomena that were studied through representation of certain symbols of sacred geometry.

To me CP parity is a restatement of the symmetry of the universe. CP, is the product of C (change conjugation) and P (parity) which creates its mirror image. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP-symmetry See prior post. The CP violation demonstrated in 1964 seemed to provide insights about physics of time movement at a quantum level, and thus evidence of one of the fundamental assertions of Buddhism: that all compound phenomina are impermant.

My symmetrical World:

Something is said to symmetrical if you can draw a line down its center and both sides look alike (reflective), or if you can rotate it on its axis to a point certain and it looks the identical in both positions (rotational). One example of a symmetrical symbol is that of the manji. This symbol of Sanskrit origin predates Buddhism and is indeed ubiquitous in many Asian countries. In Japan, for instance, if one wishes to locate a Buddhist Temple on a map, one merely looks for the manji ( http://www.shorinji-kempo.org/articles/manji/img/kyoto_higashiyama_map.gif ). Like the Chinese Tai Ji in many ways, the manji is said to demonstrate the nature of phenomena in the universe. This for many years was the primary symbol of martial art I study -- Shorinji Kempo -- and was only recently changed because of the association with Nazi Germany. Thus from a certain point of view, one could say that my study of Shorinji Kempo is a study of the manji, and thus a study of the way the universe works. Following is a picture of the old Shorinji Kempo manji breast patch: http://www.csuohio.edu/history/shiga96/images/161.jpg .

Breaking down the constituent parts of Manji: At the the north and south axis of the manji are the two extremes of heaven and earth, which are represented as the two horizontal lines represent Heaven and Earth while the left and right vertical lines represent the sunny, energy, light, movement, husband aspect on the left and the right line signifying, the moon, matter, darkness, stillness, wife aspects. Thus each of the four extremes represents the opposites or opposing forces that exist in the universe. The two lines connecting the opposites connote that which unifies the opposites and the point of intersection represents the human. The fact that the opposing heaven and earth and male and female lines are not centered on the intersecting lines like the Greek orthodox cross ( http://www3.christianforums.com/images/customavatars/avatar125318_2.gif ) represents the constant movement and change in the universe. Thus the male aspect becomes the heaven aspect, which in turn becomes the female aspect, which in turn becomes the earth aspect, etc. The manji is said to have two aspects, the rear manji (ura manji) and omote manji (front manji). The rear, representing the absolute compassion and love of the universe and the front representing the absolute power and strength of the universe, one side only existing in relation to its opposite side. The manji symbol is something of a chameleon, in that its nature depends on at what point one is viewing it. If one could stop the manji entirely, as mentioned earlier, it would look like a Greek orthodox cross, one sees the horizontal lines connecting the opposite extremes. Sped up slightly, the linear nature of manji morphs -- the straight lines at the poles become a circle, and the intersecting lines in the center become "s" shaped. ( http://www.shorinji-kempo.org/articles/manji/img/circle_manji.gif ). In another permutation of manji the intersecting lines that give order to the opposing forces appear to disappear, much like the blades of a propeller that cannot be seen when turning at speed on the small aircraft. From this vantage point, all that we are left with is the enzo ( http://www.pacific-aikido.org/images/enso.jpg ), a circle representing the impermanence of the universe.

The more I experience and investigate the more symmetrical I see the world. I think that I grew up only looking for reflective symmetry. Early on, I must admit, I did not fine much symmetry in life -- if something did not look the same right to left, then I would have seen that as asymmetrical. One of the underlying principals of my practice has been to seek not to unbalance the training. This involves maintaining a balance between hard and soft, activity and stillness, strength and compassion. Many people in Shorinji Kempo were upset by the replacement of the manji as the official symbol of the movement with the new symbol ( http://www.fpsk.pt/img/logo2005.gif ). I find it instructive that the reason for our inability to use such a wonderful symbol is due to the appropriation of the power aspect of manji by the Nazi Movement -- which is arguably the best example of what can happen when we as human beings don't foster both strength and compassion. I have heard people make the case that the origin of the Nazi atrociousness was a misuse of power, while I have heard others ague that the holocaust was a result of a lack of compassion and love for others. I think the lesson of manji is, that the origin of any problem lies in a failure of both sufficient compassion and strength -- a very symmetrical solution, indeed.