Chi
Kung Culture Society of TAIPEI
What do we need to know about being holistic?
When we are holistic, we do not have a distinguishing mind and stubbornness obscuring our thoughts and actions. To become holistic, we need to get rid of both our distinguishing mind (that is, we need to transform it into distinguishing wisdom) and our stubbornness or insistence on viewing and controlling our world according to our own preferences and habits. As we reduce our distinguishing mind and stubbornness, we also reduce the fog and poisons which misinform our mind about the world around us. These fog and poisons enable us to be stubborn and insist on our own way of doing things. They empower us to believe that we can control our world. As we get rid of our distinguishing mind and stubbornness as well as our fogs and poisons, we have a larger ability to become empty. This emptiness permits us to develop an attitude that we don't care excessively about things, so we can more easily look at things holistically and not from an attitude of 'what's in it for me' or 'how can I profit from this’.
When we are more holistic, our mind is less inclined to exaggerate things, so when others present their own views or methods of doing things, we are less likely to be defensive. When we are holistic, we don't prioritize satisfying our own vanity or our own comfort at the expense of everyone else. In short, we can see the bigger picture and how another person's view of reality is only a very small part of the larger whole. We can see this because our mind has more emptiness so it is not under a self-created pressure to insist the world conform to its view of reality and how things should be. When we are holistic, we can accept and let go of all viewpoints without reacting. Otherwise, we can only be still long enough to take in a tiny part of what we hear and react to the remaining part which we lack the emptiness to accept. The emptier you are, the more you can take in.
When we are holistic, we can balance and coordinate our inner orientation (nei dzai) and external orientation (wai dzai). This means we can use the kun dao to take in everything and not be trapped by it. Your inner orientation or focus is what you have taken in and accepted; your external orientation is what you have not been able to accept. Holistic means you can combine and manage the inner orientation and external orientation using a yin/yang tai chi method. That is, one part of the internal orientation is combined with one part of the external orientation to produce one taichi which has the dimensions of Heaven, Earth and man. Heaven is external; earth is internal and man is in between heaven and earth. We need a combination between the internal and external orientation, man and environment, and our thoughts and what we have absorbed from outside.