Going Deep in a Superficial Society
A new person joins my Qigong class. After a few weeks they feel ‘something’ between hands, and they disappear off to become a healer.
Come back, you haven’t even got started yet!
Someone joins our tai chi class and quickly learns the basic outline of the movements of the form. They disappear off thinking they have ‘done’ tai chi.
Come back, you haven’t even got started yet!
A new meditator has one spaced-out experience and thinks they are ‘awakened’.
Sorry, but you haven’t even got started yet!
Is this simply a lack of patience? Wanting quick results?
Certainly, there is a hunger for speedy results, but I think there is more to it, something quite important—our cultural lack of expectation of depth.
Have we lost sight of depth?
Consumer society trains us to jump from one thing to another, keep buying, keep subscribing. Skim the superficial. Collective spiritual experience has been downgraded through organised religion and corruption, and science, once a source of awe, has twisted out of all recognition to feed corporate greed. Consequently, it is easy to assume that there are no depths to anything. Our perception of our universe is damped down to a thin layer of experience. Feeling something during Qigong, learning the shapes of tai chi, or having a blissful experience in meditation must be ‘it’.
Superficiality is not helped by empty promises of profound insights and transformational practices from teachers who haven’t themselves appreciated the depth of the practice they are sharing. Weekend Kundalini. Meditate with your phone.
Funny Foreigners
Although European culture did have its own personal cultivation practices, they were stamped out long ago by The Church. So today cultivation practices come from foreign cultures and are therefore ‘alternative’. On TV or in mainstream media, alternative types (the sort that do tai chi or Qigong) are presented as ridiculous, and we are encouraged to laugh at their stupidity.
Perhaps there is even a tiny dose of racism? This hits both ways. There are those who consider anything exotic to be deep without necessarily doing the work. For them the foreignness is the reason they are interested. On the other hand, there are those who assume that Chinese peasants living in caves must be daft. An example is Five Element Theory. Those ‘uneducated primitives’ thought the world was made of only five elements Fire, Water, Earth, Metal and Wood? What simpletons! This ridiculous theory is taught by contemporary teachers of 5-element practices. But closer inspection reveals that the original translation from Chinese was incorrect due to the prejudice of British translators. The correct interpretation is that there are five elemental phases or ‘fundamental movements’, descriptions of how energy moves through systems on all scales. More like the fundamental forces of modern physics. Just one example of how the profound nature of ancient conceptual models has been lost due to prejudice.
I often think about the insights of the historical buddha sitting on a mat working only with mindful attention, realised that all solid matter is empty, that the deeper you go into physical matter, the more space there is. And that all solidity is impermanent and vibrating. Nothing is static. Everything is process. We know this now via scientific exploration using expensive equipment, but he gained direct insight 2600 years ago with no technological assistance. He also realised that what we consider to be ‘the self’ is continually constructed and reconstructed psychologically rather than it being a discernible part of your mind or body. His insight into the human mind was so profound that even today, cognitive scientists confer with Buddhist scholars when addressing difficult questions. Again, the superficial ‘bells and smells’ of modern Buddhism mask a cultivation practice of immense depth.
Cultivation practices involve developmental processes
Our nervous system needs time to grow new connections, our mind needs time to learn how to process perception differently, ‘systems’ (seen and unseen) need to adjust to new expectations of the world. This is not like training our body in the gym so that we look good. It is the “self” that is being cultivated, and the outcomes of such practices are not products which can be purchased. If there is no discernible product, how do you know when you have got what you came for?
With a little application to these practices, you are likely to notice that you don’t over-react like you used to, or that you feel more compassion for people who used to annoy you. You may find your energy levels are more constant, you no longer have chronic back ache and your mind is quieter. When you are sick, you seem to recover quicker, chronic conditions lessen or stabilise rather than worsening, and you have insights that lead your life in the right direction. Such results are readily achievable (even in our society) but there is much more to be gained from such practices.
The ultimate aims of cultivation traditions such as Taoism and Buddhism are described as Return to Source or Awakening. Along the way practitioners experience perceptual changes sometimes known as Siddhis. This is officially known as Spooky Shit. You can, for example, place your conscious awareness in any location at any scale and sense what is there. But having skills is not the aim. Rather, they are signposts indicating that profound changes are taking place. You are on your way to true Awakening (the direct, experiential realization of the true nature of reality).
Over decades my own unhealthy cynical approach has humbled into giving these weird practices more respect. The language and symbolism may be peculiar, and teachers of these arts often underestimate their own practices, but depths there certainly are.
I deliberately talk of depths rather than heights which might seem odd seeing as how most of us are interested in progressing in an upward direction: higher vibrations, lightness and ‘higher’ dimensions. Downwards is undesirable. My justification is that depth is not the same as ‘descent’ because (as far as I can work out) reality does not sit on a singular axis. One way to visualise depth is by applying the common metaphor applied in meditative practices in which your conscious mind is the activity at the surface of an ocean, the noisy choppy water at the intersect of conscious and unconscious mind. As our mind settles our awareness sinks deep into the depths of ocean. We begin to inhabit a bigger space connecting with a more universal (less individual) consciousness. This shift takes us from the accumulation of knowledge to insight wisdom.
