I was born in 1969, the summer of Love. Seven years later a movie was released on my birthday that changed the way I looked at life – Star Wars. I became a fan of the characters and stories that George Lucas created. However, as I grew, nothing captured my attention like the idea of The Force.
At the time I was too young to know that while the idea of a Jedi Knight was new, the concept of a all-encompassing, life sustaining force – one that could be controlled with our minds – was not new. Then, during a very dark time in my young life, just prior to my teens, I discovered Bruce Lee.
I studied Bruce. I knew he was a smaller man, but tremendously strong. I knew you could build muscular strength, but was there more? I researched many martial arts and found the thing that captivated me most – Chi.
I found The Force existing in my world. It is Chi.
Now, it may not quite have the power (yet?) of the full force. Like I have yet to see a taoist monk crumble walls with the wave of a hand. But I have seen demonstrations of tremendous power and focus – shaolin monks holding bowls against their stomach with their mind(conspicuously over the Dantian, 3 inches below the navel, for those Qigong-TCM lovers); hand stands on one index finger, Mr Miyagi breaking of the top of a 6 beer bottles on a car fender with a knife hand chop , bending rebar with the nape of the neck, that type of thing. These all have to do with the mind’s ability to cultivate chi energy resources within the body and direct those resources to a particular part of the body.
Sound like the Force to you?
Now if you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, do your research. This is some pretty fascinating stuff.
So, here we have an instance of some super human power..that can be cultivated. Yet, we have it even better of than our fictional counterparts the Jedi Knights. They have to have a midichlorians in their body.
“Without the midi-chlorians, life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the Force. They continually speak to us, telling us the will of the Force. When you learn to quiet your mind, you’ll hear them speaking to you.“―Qui-Gon Jinn, to Anakin Skywalker
The midichlorian count in their blood measures their ability and strength in the Force. The higher the count the more powerful the Jedi. You could say it’s kind of like that for us in our reality.
There’s a catch though. We don’t need some weird symbiotic microorganism to give us power. We all have it and we can cultivate it!
There are some of us that are more prone to things like mediation. Some of us are drawn to taiji quan and moving really slowly as a method of training. These aren’t your average pastimes…or people. It’s the same for yogis. Yoga is not just about having a good stretch and calling it a day. It’s about breath, becoming one with the breath, it’s sexy, and ultimately it’s about opening up energy centers. One man’s “Seat of the Soul” is another man’s “Dantian.”
There is something in us that it drawn to connecting with the Chi. The life force. The energy that flows through the worlds and ties together things. Our heart is encased by the pericardium, a fibrous conductive sheath that protects the heart and root blood vessels. It conducts bio-electricity to those areas. Is it not impossible to think that there is a chi energy that permeates all things and ties all those different energy signatures together.
I mean, that’s what all things are, aren’t they? Quantum Physics and my mentor Deepak Chopra can tell you that all things extend from the Void or Quantum Field. These things that we identify in our reality have all been thought into existence by a greater consciousness and by you and me. The things we share have a common reality yet they are individual packets of information bundled with a specific energy signature.
However, we are all interconnected. Cause and Effect. The Law of Attraction. The physical law of every action has an equal and opposite reaction – a reaction of equal energetic value and not necessarily opposite such as the case of positive vs negative.
We are One. Ultimately we are energy but we are far removed from the original source. We are a part of a visible, tactile, emotive three (four? five?) dimensional reality. Yet with our minds we can tap into part of that source field, beyond our reality. You can call it what you will, universal consciousness, it doesn’t matter. It simply is. We all share the same origin.
This is why you should believe in chi. It has been proven. And this is an on going discussion of it’s proof.