This workshop is a pilot project. Thandeka as a theologian and philosopher has devoted herself to work on the relationship between mind and body, on the origins of religious emotion for more than 30 years, using insights from the brain science of emotions, Schleiermacher’s affect theology and insights from quantum physics. I have been fully engaged in the practice of meditation and the research on Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, the relating fields of science, including brain science and quantum physics, as well as philosophy, especially process philosophy of Alfred N. Whitehead in the past 13 years.
Both of us have started our journey first for healing ourselves. For Thandeka it’s her trauma in her early life. For me it’s my cancer. But we both come to realize that the effort to heal reveals a deeper reality, a deeper understanding of the relationship between mind and body, about the human nature. And not only that. It also leads to a deeper understanding of our relationship with all beings, with the nature and the cosmos.
We both have found the critical importance of pause, often pause for a while in each day of our life so that we can really feel, really experience, and communicate with ourselves and with other people at the level of feelings and experiences, but not get stuck in our minds, not try to convince each other simply through words and opinions. It’s only through systematic practice of pause with consciousness, we can get connected to our true self, and help each other to achieve their true selves.
On the other hand, Thandeka’s approach and my approach also differ in subtle but important aspects because of our different cultural backgrounds. While Thandeka’s approach also emphasizes the experience of the infinite universe felt in a finite moment of your own life she focuses on its locus: “the inbetween,” the place between events where the experience of energy surging begins between our mind and body, between our connections with ourselves and with other people, with nature and the cosmos, which is first felt by the body as infinite fullness—pure experience—while the mind, at the same time, is absolutely empty of thought and thus in a state of pure awareness. She emphasizes how this space for interconnection-consciousness gets lost and how to find this space again.
My approach emphasizes the experience of the circulation of energy in us.
This circulation of energy is based on the Taoist cosmology of Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang are both manifestations and movements of Qi. Their dynamic interaction and balance sustain our life and its healthy development. Its existence and great significance for healing various types of physical and mental health issues, for deeper understanding of our true self and the relationship between mind and body, and for achieving the full capacity of each of us as human beings in our life, can be tested by each of us personally.
I’m sure both approaches can be integrated and lead to a more complete self-awareness and pure experience.
We believe our collaboration is of great importance for today’s world. As we all can see, our environment is getting toxic. Both in the US and in the world at large, the existing order is collapsing. People are under stress, become depressed and get angry easily. There are wars and more wars loom in the distance.
At a time when science and technology have been highly developed and are still fast developing, especially in the area of AI, these symptoms hint at deeper problems, which are related to our belief. Both Thandeka and I believe the world is having a metaphysical crisis. Why? We do not know how to think about what ails us, because we can’t feel what we’ve lost so there’s nothing to think of talk about. We need a new vocabulary for this work. We need concepts that define what’s lost in the environment in which we live, which is why we call it a metaphysical problem: the conceptual ability to explain and prompt practices cultivating Qi. Without the right concepts the physical experiences are unknowable by the mind.
Persons who live a little distance from their bodies get sick mentally and physically because they have lost access to the life-giving surging energy of Qi.
A society under the reign of a philosophy that separates mind from body falls apart. To really heal this rupture, we cannot simply target the symptom, but need to address the root problem.
And we are not simply doing speculative analysis. We are doing real body and mind therapies. With the knowledge of circulation of Qi, combined with PDR, meditation and deep dialogue, reflection over our beliefs, the experience of energy flow and its healing effect, such insight and practice bring forth our personal wellbeing and the welfare of the society at large, national and international. This is why I believe our online workshop model, albeit a small beginning, will gain momentum gradually and at a certain point, spread wide and vast.
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