Dear friends,
As the year is coming to the end, it’s time to reflect upon what has occurred to us in the past year and what changes we have gone through. Life keeps flowing and changing, little by little. I wish I could keep a track of it, as life does not simply flow, but it strives to grow, like a tree. By keeping an eye on it, I can stay in tune with and consciously nurture its growth.
In the beginning of the past year I had two cases of intensive private tutoring of healing meditation. The clients, two women at their 60s, were both cancer patients. One is Mrs. Lv, who has lymphoma with bone metastasis, and the other one is Mrs. Long, with lung cancer.
Mrs. Lv had had several rounds of chemotherapy before she came to me. She could hardly move and had a lot of pain when the tutoring started. My work with her lasted for nearly 40 days and the training includes sitting meditation, standing meditation, walking, stretching, jogging, etc. Little by little her mobility improved and her pain was slowly alleviated. By the end of the tutoring she could jog slowly and walk in the mountain for half an hour. I hereby attach a video showing her change from April 24 to June 2.
Mrs. Long started practicing meditation under my instruction soon after she was diagnosed, without having any medical treatment, as her daughter in law had followed my wechat blog for more than 2 years. Her mother had lung cancer and died after many rounds of medical treatment. So she persuaded her husband and her mother in law to try a more natural and holistic way. Due to the serious epidemic situation in Shenzhen, I was invited to their hometown and gave the tutoring for the woman as well as her son, daughter and the daughter in law in March. I worked with them for 10 days. The woman had been a farmer all her life and was basically healthy. Her experience in meditation deepened quickly. By the end of the 10-day workshop, she already had strong feeling of Qi circulation in the body and really enjoyed practicing meditation. Before the workshop she had no movement except her labor as farmer. It was a great burden for her to jog in the beginning. By the end of the workshop she could already jog quite easily. After the workshop she attended my online meditation group. The group met two nights per week. She later started to take targeted medicine besides meditation. Now she jogs each morning for several kilometers and does rope skipping in addition to sitting meditation every day. Some weeks ago she reported that her tumor has shrunk from the size of an egg to the size of a small grape.
There are other successful cases for healing cancer through meditation based on Taoism in the past year. They indicate the great significance of meditation for boosting the power of spontaneous healing in us. So meditation is not only for psychological benefits, and works only at the mental level. Rather, it directly relates to the function of the whole body and corrects any defects that are caused by our continuous neglect of our physical and mental state.
I have to point out that my understanding of meditation is based on Taoism and Confucianism, which have a cosmology that is different from modern science as well as from Buddhism. According to the cosmology of Taoism and Confucianism, the cosmos is not static, but keeps on evolving by its very nature. Ying and Yang are the two opposite, but mutually supporting and nourishing processes of energy flow which propels the evolution of the cosmos. As a result, myriad forms of life come into being. There is the same dipolar energy flow in us, which constitutes the circulation of Qi. If this circulation goes smoothly without interruption or suppression, we keep on evolving as an individual and remain healthy both physically and mentally. Or else we suffer various forms of emotional disturbance and become too weak to resist the harmful elements in the environment, including virus.
In the past year I have been trying to find in the western heritage of culture a philosophy or cosmology that is compatible with this one. I read some interesting books, such as Irrational Man by William Barrett (a knowledgeable book for existentialism), Einführung in die Philosophie (Introduction of Philosophy) by Karl Jaspers, Hegel by Frederick Beiser, Aristotle by Jonathan Barnes, etc. I realize that indeed there is a thread of intellectual development in the west which regards the cosmos as an organic process of evolution rather than a mechanical machine that runs according to some physical laws.
What’s more interesting is, in the last several months of this year, I found that the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead is an even more marvellous elaboration of such a cosmology, which is a genius combination of strict scientific reasoning and talented imagination. There are many concepts in Whiteheadean philosophy which I like very much. First of all it argues for a one-substance cosmology, in which ‘actual entities’ are the final real things of which the world is made up. Actual entities are not physical objects like atoms, but ‘drops of experiences’. In addition to that, ‘creativity’ is the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact, which is also the inherent nature of each actual entity.
I haven’t had the time to explore the Whiteheadean philosophy deeply. I just took two courses given by the Cobb Institute in the US (The Cobb Institute) on the Whiteheadean philosophy and started to read some of Whitehead’s works, such as Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas, etc. My first encounter with Whitehead is very enlightening and I will do more research.
In Process and Reality, Whitehead said:“Whatever thread of presupposition characterizes social expression throughout the various epochs of rational society must find its place in philosophic theory. Speculative boldness must be balanced by complete humility before logic and before fact. It is a disease of philosophy when it is neither bold nor humble, but merely a reflection of the temperamental presuppositions of exceptional personalities. By providing the generic notions philosophy should make it easier to conceive the infinite variety of specific instances which rest unrealized in the womb of nature.”
Such a cosmology that is compatible with modern sciences and also strives to reconcile them with our religious experience is exactly what I’m searching for. It makes the experience of Qi and the healing effect of meditation even more intelligible. And I believe it is philosophy, rather than particular branches of sciences, be it neurology, brain science or quantum physics, that provides the proper vehicle for understanding meditation and meanwhile the guiding principles for it.
In early December, I had the chance to give an online presentation in English with the title “Healing in a Chinese Process Way” at the Cobb Institute. 97-year-old Prof. John Cobb, Jr., one of the leading scholars on process philosophy in our time attended the presentation and gave very warm and affirmative comments. The recording has been uploaded to the online archive of the Cobb Institute and can be retrieved via this link: Meeting Recordings – 2022 | Cobb Institute.
By the date of Jan. 13, 2023, it will be totally 10 years since I first started to practice meditation for the purpose of healing my lymphoma. From the very beginning I decided to approach meditation in a scientific and rational way, so that the healing effect of meditation could be strictly tested and, if it does have such effect, its mechanism should be understood in an intelligible way. I have followed this approach strictly in the past 10 years and now I can say I have fully achieved the goal. Not only I have recovered from my lymphoma, as well as other chronic problems including prostatitis, atrophic gastritis, ankylosing spondylitis, etc. in a totally natural way, without using any drugs or therapies except sitting and moving meditation, but also I have helped a lot of people achieve the same result by sharing my experience with them. What’s more, I can now explain in a very practical and intelligible way why this is possible and how we can achieve it in a most reliable and efficient way.
In the presentation I said that a new story of life is possible when we can integrate the intellectual heritages of the West and the East. With that I mean a form of life that is not doomed to become more and more vulnerable as we slowly get older. There is an inherent driving force in each of us that continuously nourishes and leads the development of our life so that it keeps evolving as the cosmos does. Or we can even say the conscious evolution of each of us by itself is a cosmic event, as each of us is the particular embodiment of the cosmic process.
After 3 years’ of entanglement with the corona virus, we finally see the light of free movement in China again. People in the world have suffered a lot from the virus. However, as always in our life, suffering can be a call and an urge for evolution.
I wish you all merry Christmas and a healthy, peaceful and happy New Year!
Zhenbao
From Shenzhen, China
meditationtaoist 