Ch'i, Higgs bosons, and Kierkegaard.

So what is this Ch'i stuff anyway? If you saw The Empire Strikes Back you already know. Yoda explained it quite well, except he called it The Force. The Chinese pictogram for Ch'i is often translated into English as breath, energy, or life force, but it's more than that. In Eastern philosophy everything in the universe is made up of a single, elemental force. It is both matter because it makes up everything and energy because it flows through and around everything, binding everything together into a unified whole. That's the essence of Ch’i.

In some respects there are similarities between this belief and concepts from physics related to the Unified Field Theory. Scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider hope to demonstrate the existence of the Higgs boson (a.k.a. the God particle), a fundamental field that pervades all space and interacts with other particles. Sound familiar?

Because of the similarities between Eastern thought and physics, it would be fairly simple for me to come up with some plausible sounding but bogus justification for the existence if Ch'i based on Western science, but I won't. I agree with Kierkegaard that science and faith are two different and incomparable things. One should not use one to prove or disprove the other. I include in faith any belief or concept that is based purely on empirical evidence, which includes Ch'i. More on that later.

Science is the practice of establishing measurable and verifiable cause and effect relationships using mathematics and experimentation. Faith attempts to describe conceptually things that cannot be measured or experimented upon. These are totally unrelated activities. That is why I'm as unimpressed by attempts to use fMRIs to prove Ch'i as I am by attempts to date the age of the earth by using the time lines in the Bible. Both use irrational assumptions that try to link science and faith.

[Note: If the idea of comparing Eastern philosophy and modern physics interests you I recommend a book from the 1970s called The Tao of Physics. It’s a fun read even if the physics is a bit dated. ]

So what is Ch'i and does it really exist? It doesn't matter. The word and concept of Ch'i simply make it easier to discuss and teach the different modalities of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Since TCM began about 5000 or 6000 years ago, they did not have the benefit of MRIs, CT scans, Xrays, or microscopes. The Chinese experimented on themselves (or each other most likely) and began keeping records on what happened to a certain ailment when they tried treatment A,B,C, or D. That is the process that lead to therapies like acupuncture and Ch'i Kung.

Unlike Western medicine, they never tried to figure out logically why action B helped condition Y. They simply checked thousands and thousands of records and determined that if you defecate near your source of drinking water you are likely to get sick and die. Even though they knew nothing about bacteria, they figured out you should wash your hands after going to the bathroom and before eating. This was at a time when primitive Europeans were living in their own filth and blaming diseases on evil spirits and witches.

The concepts of Ch'i and meridians are just conceptual frameworks, not necessarily reality. So when I say Ch'i can get stuck in your joints I do not mean that billions and billions of Higgs bosons are trapped under your patellae. I'm simply saying your Ch'i Kung session is likely to work better if you massage your joints after you do it.

Before you discount any medical therapy based purely on empirical evidence, I’d like to point out that Western medicine does it too. No one has ever proven scientifically that high cholesterol levels cause heart disease. But years of records indicate that people who have high cholesterol have more heart disease. No one knows why, yet millions of dollars are spent each year on statin drugs to reduce cholesterol. It's all based on nothing but empirical evidence gleaned from medical records.

So lets see, modern Western medicine has a couple of hundred years of records at best. Traditional Chinese Medicine has thousands. Keep that in mind if you decide to try Ch'i Kung or any other form of TCM. Try to keep an open mind and see for yourself what, if anything, happens.