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Ever since I found the tai chi space I’ve been convinced that wu ji could be “found” in a similar way. Tai Chi Chuan is based on and organized around the tai chi space. IMO, without it you’re not doing Tai Chi.
It may be nothing more than a logical leap, but I think Bagua is organized around wu ji and without it you aren’t doing Bagua. The tai chi space is something real, tangible, and physiologically based. Wu ji is more elusive. But, I think the it is really simple: between every yin and yang pair there is emptiness in the center. That’s what the diagram basically illustrates. It has a whole bunch of symbols that have manifested. Each has its opposite on the other side of the diagram and each has an empty center between them. Bagua wants to find that empty space between opposites.
In contrast, Tai Chi Chuan plays with the state where yin and yang are perfectly balanced but you haven’t committed to fully expressing either one yet. That’s very different than finding where yin and yang actually came from.
Bagua wants to find wu ji, the place where the tai chi space comes from. As an art we use all of the neigung to first find the tai chi space and then wu ji. That’s why Bagua is superior to Tai Chi – it contains everything that Tai Chi Chuan has but goes a little further.
You can get glimpses of wu ji from any neigung element as long as you get to the place where you can manifest both yin and yang aspects simultaneously while observing the space between them. The more of these you can do and the more completely you do them, the deeper your experience of wu ji becomes.
You could look at the organization of the palm changes in this way. The first four are about finding the tai chi space. The Fire Palm teaches you what open is really about and how it contains the close. Water is what close is really about and how it contains the open. The Earth palm is about doing open and close simultaneously. The Lake palm is opening and closing simultaneously while finding the emptiness between them.
Put more abstractly: yang | yin | both yin and yang | neither yin nor yang.
I really think I’m onto something. It all gets back to the phrase “the mind directs the chi”. Bagua crosses into meditation when you start exploring how the mind directs the chi. Where does the conscious thought come from that tells your body to open or close, or to do anything for that matter? When you find the place inside where it comes from, you start to go out.
Watch Module 12 video 22 at around 1:30. This morning I found how Bruce does what he is demonstrating on Isacc. Bruce’s explanation/description is literal. This is where you start to find out what you are and what emptiness is. To do Bagua, you have to find wu ji.
I’ve been returning to the earlier palm changes, in particular, the Double and Wind Palm Changes. I’m back to exploring the etheric body. Although I’m not convinced that everything is generated and felt inside the body, I find the practice of Bagua and playing with the etheric field fascinating.
At this point, I’m thinking that opposites are born from the center. It is from the central channel that we can experience wu ji. My definition of the central channel has changed. It is more abstract. Because opposites can be created inside or outside the body, the central channel isn’t just inside the bones or bone marrow. That is the easiest place to find it. Since it is essentially one connected whole, it is everywhere. The challenge is experiencing that. Bagua can be a systematic approach to finding and understanding it.
This post may be total B.S. or one of the most profound I’ve ever written. Time will tell.
I continue to work with the central channel and continue trying to find wu ji. I think I’ve found a way to use emptiness to open and close. There is a trick to it.
If you want to open (for example a joint), typically you’ll compress and close at bit first, and then expand. When you get significantly better, you never disconnect from the compression while you expand. This is the both yin and yang phase. In this technique there is always time: the open or close takes time and occurs over some duration. If you use emptiness, there is no time.
The trick is not to try to experience emptiness. That’s impossible. By definition emptiness is, well…, empty. You can’t experience it. Instead, you experience everything else. It’s like in meditation – we’re looking for the thing behind the experience.
Normally, if I want to expand, I go in first. I compress. Then I experience whatever is compressing in a bigger and bigger context. It grows. Tissue compressing on top of compression. Layer by layer.
Using emptiness, I’m instantly at the boundary of what I can feel and experience (whatever amount that may be). Emptiness is just behind the last thing I can feel. I’m not experiencing emptiness. I’m experiencing everything else.
The same thing happens when I close using emptiness. I’m instantly aware of how far I’ve closed. The emptiness is like a vacuum. It is a void that can’t be experienced directly. I just experience everything else. They are not really separate, but they do define each other. Patterns and changes begin to spontaneously appear. There seems to be “rules” or defined ways the change happens. More concretely, you start to understand how a close changes to an open or a open changes to a close and how to use emptiness to facilitate the change.
Who knows, but I think this is what Bagua is ultimately about.
Module 11 video lesson 9 has some great insight into emptiness. Unfortunately it is wrapped in a lot of extraneous crap. The big take-away is how the mind is intimately connected to emptiness. Like finding the tai chi space, once you’ve found emptiness, you still need to practice. Emptiness just makes what Bruce has been trying to teach all these years make sense.
Relaxation becomes really important. There is this strange trade off between manifestation and emptiness. The more solid the body feels the less emptiness you experience. The more you relax the more you experience emptiness. And, importantly, the more transient everything appears. This experience of transience may be exactly why Bagua is so focused on change.
It isn’t so much relaxation as the purity of doing. The mechanism doesn’t have sensors, but it is responsible for creating the signals that ultimately tell the body to move. The mechanism is in the central channel and it really only does one of two things: 1) it expands, or 2) it condenses.
I think I stated this incorrectly. It would be more accurate to say the tai chi space is the neutral place before we commit to yin or yang. Tai chi space can be felt. Wu ji is the where we command the yin or yang to manifest. Wu ji doesn’t have sensors so we can feel it;however, you can recognize when you’ve got it.
The more you relax, the better you can do it because it doen’t require tension. It is the thing that can create tension, but that isn’t what we want. That’s counter productive.
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