Meditation and soft forms

I have heard Tai Chi described as a dance.  This is perhaps not the best description to use for it. I shall attempt in this document to describe it and what it is used for. To begin let us look at meditation. What is meditation and why do people meditate?

Meditation

Meditation is a natural part of life and every person in the world meditates regularly whether they are aware of it or not. It is as natural a part of our daily routine as breathing and as necessary to our ability to function as sleeping.  What do you know about me? I’ve never meditated, before and I never intend to, one might say.  Everyone, meditates regularly you need to survive. Meditation in its most simple sense is the act of self-awareness. Every time you go for a walk near the ocean and let your mind wander out to the surf; Every time you go out in the garden and get involved in the act of pruning a tree; every time you look up at the stars and are amazed by their vastness; Every time you take a deep breath of air to regain your composure; All of these times and many more you are engaging in the act of meditation. The big difference between the average person and the formal meditator is that they have a defined method and a constant regimen.

Let us for a moment look at consciousness and different states of awareness. We can think basically in three states. We can think of the past in our memories, we can think of the future in our dreams and plans, we can think of the present in experiencing the moment. All of our thinking takes place in the present and it is the only time that truly exists. When we remember, we are doing it in the present and it is colored by our present-day emotions and mental state. When we plan for the future we are doing it in the present moment, and our plans our vision is based on what we feel and know in the moment of thinking.  The present is the only time when we can truly think. It is the only time that truly exists.

Let us for a moment look at perception and how it relates to our consciousness.  What is it that happens when we perceive things in our surroundings? The world, for the most part, is interpreted to us through our five senses.  I do say interpreted because in many ways we decide what we want to see and how we want to see them. To better explain this, let us take the example of vision.  How do we perceive through vision?

Light is reflected off an object and it hit the retina of our eye. The light waves excite the sensory receptors in our eyes. I chemical reaction occurs and impulses are sent to the brain. It is now the going theory that memory is created by patterns of impulses set up in our cortex. The object we see is perceived and we begin to match it up to existing patterns looking for something similar or a possible match.

In any given moment in a day, we are bombarded with thousands of impulses that come to us through our senses.  As we drive to work in the morning we take no note of the people we see in the cars passing by or the trees in the nearby park.  We do see them. We take no note of the pressure on the tips of our fingers as we grip the weal. We do feel it.  Well, why sound that matter, this information is non-essential to our task.

As society grows ever more complex, we would go crazy if we tried to pay attention to all of the information that bombards our senses moment to moment. Every moment that passes we make a judgment as to what is important to take note of an what is not. How do I make this decision? When I first meet people as a joke, I often tell them that my mother is Korean and a little while later that my father is Native American. I am a Caucasian.    Most people don’t catch onto the impossibility of this until I tell them about my father. Some don’t catch on at all.  Many people in idle conversation ask questions as a polite exchange. Before the question is formulated, an expected answer is already anticipated.

Perception

Perception quite often tends to be interpreted. We tend to see the world through the filter of our state of mind.  The state of true awareness or what many people refer to as the Zen state is experiencing your environment free of interpretation.  For most of us, this is not really possible as the very tools and symbols that we use to understand what we perceive make up our conditioning. There is no such thing as a purely objective thought.  My father would always do is utmost to be non-emotional about his decisions. He would try to push away emotions as if they were a bad disease and stick to logic.  Like the emperor parades his new clothes, he is the only one fooled.  Logic is merely a tool used to achieve an end. All decisions in life are driven by some type of emotion.  Desire is the force that quantifies our decisions.  A person becomes a good or a bad person depending on the actions do to you or those who surround you. Along with every experience that is programmed into it is some type of emotional memory.  Even the most insipid of calculus lectures are still remembered with some emotion, no matter how slight.

In its purest sense, a soft form is a recording of a state of mind.  I can not describe to you a state of mind, because it is a thought. It has no images that directly relate to it in the outside world. Trying to describe a state of mind is a little like trying to describe the feeling of an emotion.  Let us take a look at anger. We can not describe the feeling directly. We can only relate how it makes our body feel, or what affects it has on those around us. We can only describe it in terms of poetic images. It does not exist as an object in the common world.

States of mind are like this as well.  If we want to learn a golf swing from a professional we might well look at a video recording of it and try to mimic the body movements. In the end, it is the feel of the body as we make the swing that lets us replicate it.  Soft forms such as Tai Chi Chuan are like this.  A master has meditated of used some other introvert discipline to become aware of an acute state of mind.  The variations on different heightened states of mind can be varied and complex. It is not the goal of this paper to attempt to describe them.  Let us suffice to say that they can cover areas encompassing clearer thinking, heightened relaxation, enhanced focus, generating emotional energy.

The master can not describe these feeling easily. It is like trying to explain what fruit tastes like to a person who has never tasted it.  The instructor will opt to have the student experience the feeling, just like you would pass the person the fruit so he could taste it.

We communicate in symbols. Our entire world and our conscious thought if interpreted in symbols.  Every movement that we make, every position of the body evokes an emotional response and a state of mind. Part of this is due to our social conditioning whose alphabet has been developed over thousands of years of social integration. Part of it is due to the physiology of the body and the subtle effects each position and movements have upon our mind.  Whichever the case may be, a soft form is a set of movements designed to have the student experience a certain state of mind.

The movements are not as important as the feeling behind them. As soon as a student has learned the movements, he should forget about them and let the form take over. It may be a little hard to envision for those who have never practiced a soft form, but the form has a feeling of its own, and in many ways, the form will begin to take over and move the student.  It is a give and take.