Root Principles
the world according to acupuncturists and animists alike
In response to a reader request for some more intro-level material, I’ve been thinking about what would constitute a series of posts on the basics—not just basics of East Asian Medicine (for that, see the recent Five Elements post and its sequel), but of traditional wisdom more broadly. Maybe that’s a tall order, but it dovetails enough with an old half-finished project that I wanted to roll up my sleeves and take a stab at it.
What follows is quirky, incomplete attempt nonetheless to articulate insights that were once common across cultures. Most of these “insights” were more like assumptions, i.e. those who’ve held them have had little need to make them explicit. But scratch the surface of Chinese or Hindu or Yoruba cosmology (to name three worldviews with which I have some familiarity) and they’re there. Let’s see what we can uncover. -JEd
#1 The world is alive. It speaks to us all the time.
We big-headed bipeds are not agents acting against a sterile backdrop. We’re part of an intricate, intimate web of intelligence.
These days we happen to be making disruptive waves in that web, and there’s no shortage of voices telling us to check ourselves. Being stubborn in our delusion that we’re at the center of an inanimate world, we require these voices to speak louder and louder to get our attention. So far, even tsunamis, earthquakes and hurricanes don’t seem to be enough.
Rough as things have gotten, we can learn to listen again. The first requirement is humility, a willingness to slow down, set aside our overdeveloped ideas for a moment and let ourselves be child-like at something again.
#2 The part reflects the whole.
As they say in the jin jing gong lineage of qigong practice, “I am in the universe, the universe is in me.” We’re simultaneously parts and wholes, and so is most everything else.
This so-called ‘holographic principle’ is the reason a skilled acupuncturist can take the patient’s pulse and glean so much about their health: the wave of the pulse is a kind of hologram encoding the state of the whole. By the same token, it’s why a glance at someone’s natal astrology chart can reveal lots about their character and destiny.
Thankfully, a corollary of this principle is that we can come back into resonance with this greater whole. A great many traditional practices from taiji to folk singing help us do just that.
#3 Things move in cycles.
Time’s not linear, it’s more like a long, slow spiral (with lots of smaller spirals nested within—see #2 above).
This is in direct contrast to the myth of progress and the assumption that we’re somehow better than those benighted ancestors of ours. In truth, they’re probably the ones worried about us. But they realize we’ll come back around, eventually. Things tend to, given time.
#4 The subtle is as important (or more so) than the gross.
This is akin to that old saw, “mind over matter.” It means recognizing that just because an influence may not be visible or directly perceptible, that doesn’t mean it isn’t potent. This awareness is implicit in practices such as smudging, warding off the evil eye, and most other forms of ritual intervention. It’s why we should pay attention to “vibes”: chances are some subconscious part of us is picking up on something meaningful, even if we can’t put our finger on what it is.
Another way to look at it: most actions (gross) start as ideas (subtle). If we can clean up our mental landscape, we have a lot less heavy lifting to do in the material realm. Many technologies, from computers to acupuncture, work on this principle.
#5 Quality is (at Least) as Important as Quantity
This is a kind of special case of #4 above, but I think it bears spelling out in our current, quantity-obsessed cultural context.
Consider the mainstream approach to nutrition. We count calories and measure how much fat, how much protein, how many carbs. Never mind that carbs differ tremendously, proteins aren’t created equal, and as for fats, those are the most varied of all.
According to a saying I’ve heard credited (albeit vaguely) to American Indian sources, “the soul of the animal is in the fat.” This has always rung true for me. You can taste the difference between a farmed fish and a wild one, feel the difference in the texture of the oil. Your cells certainly know the difference. There’s no faking good fat, any more than you can fake good music. You can’t fake soul, either, last I checked.
The point is, no amount of quantity makes up for a lack of quality. And if true quality is there, you can get by on surprisingly little of a thing.
#6 The Earth is an Incredible School, Stage, Game Board, Marketplace—but Not Our Ultimate Home.
As Teilhard de Chardin famously put it, “we’re spiritual beings having a material experience.” We may be bound to the wheel of samsara, compelled by our karmas to return to this realm again and again, or simply fond of visiting the “marketplace” of Earth (as the Yoruba conceive of it).
But home is, on some level, elsewhere. Star dust infuses our marrow, and our souls remember layers of existence our meat brains are forced to forget.
None of this means we should value the Earth or our bodies any less==just the opposite. As Tom Waits sings, “We’re chained to the world / and we all gotta pull.” We’re in this thing together and the only way out is through. It helps to be here fully. But paradoxically, remembering our connection to a subtler dimension can make being here on Earth just as little more doable, not least because there’s considerable help to be had from our not-currently-incarnate home crew if we open ourselves to it.
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