Some of you may have heard of Chi, if only because Chi is the second word of Tai Chi. Chi is the old transliteration. Qi is now the more accepted term. If you study Qi, that's called Qigong. In the English tradition derived from the Greek it would be called Qiology. Dr. Yang, Jwing-Ming has studied Qi for most of his life. He thinks Qi is electricity flowing inside the human body. I agree with him.
He gives several reasons:
- Fascia (a membrane separating parts of the body) is an insulator.
- Tendons are conductors.
- Relaxed muscles are conductors; tensed muscles are insulators.
- Chinese Qigong emphasizes the need for relaxation to make Qi flow.
- The intestines (the lower Dan Tien) can act as a chemical battery with sufficient training and manipulation.
- The brain is in control of all of this, but there is little feedback from these processes, therefore much attention to subtle detail and much training is required to employ Qi.
- (etc.)
I add several observations of my own:
- The reason Western medicine has almost no understanding of electricity flowing inside the human body is because Western medicine is based on dissection of corpses. No electricity flowing there.
- Cutting open live people and probing them with voltmeters is frowned-upon. However, if you measure the resistance between two points of the skin, you will find that the resistance decreases when you measure at two Qi meridians (this is from _The Body Electric_).
- Relaxation is necessary for Qi-using martial arts (also known as "internal arts") because muscles relax slowly. If you aren't already relaxed when you try to use Qi, you won't be able to.
- You can see a pop culture view of the effects of internal martial arts in movies like Kill Bill, Shaolin Soccer, and Kung Fu Hustle. You can see that these practitioners are capable of extraordinary feats of speed and strength. They do this by direct electrical stimulation of the muscles; not through nervous stimulation, but electrical stimulation. This cannot be done using the nerves because they are electrochemical, and are limited in speed and magnitude of the signal. You may guess that this takes an ungodly amount of training, and you would be correct; at least a decade to achieve the least skill.
- If you've ever electrocuted yourself (not that I recommend it), you know what Qi feels like, only Qi is more subtle. You can stick your tongue on a 9V battery if you simply cannot live without the experience.
- The Chinese historically had little knowledge of electricity; thus they never developed a theory of Qi as electricity. Without that essential element, all of their theory is based on fitting to practice. That's why some of the Chinese theories about Qi are pretty whacked. That's not how a scientist creates a theory. You create a theory from whole cloth by generalizing from practice and then examine the practice to see how it fits. That's how plate tectonics came to be accepted within my lifetime; Walter Alvarez noticed that if you took the Atlantic Ocean away, the continents fitted together too neatly.
- The weird postures you see in Yoga are designed to tense some muscles and relax others. That's otherwise a very difficult thing to do without moving. This gets your Qi flowing to different parts of your body with comparatively little training needed.
Yeah, this sounds pretty screwy, and you might think it's poo unless you're studying Qigong and/or you're an electrical engineer. This theory isn't proven, but I know of nothing to disprove it.
