1. The science of qigong — qi in its tangible form
Qigong is a movement and breathing practice that Chinese people have used since antiquity to stay well and to live long. The Jade Pendant Inscription on the Circulation of Qi, published in the Warring States period around 380 BC, already contains the lines: "To circulate the qi: draw it deep and it gathers; gathered, it extends; extended, it descends…" The "circulation of qi" it describes is breath work — what later generations came to call qigong.
In the language of modern science, the various senses of qi (氣) actually stand for different physical and physiological phenomena. When we use qi of the human body — organ qi, say, or blood qi — we are talking about the physiological function of a tissue or an organ, something that can be measured and defined with modern medical instruments. Saying that someone looks off-color, for instance, can be pinned down through temperature, respiration, blood flow velocity, heart rate, EEG, EMG, blood oxygen and organ function. The external qi of martial arts fiction — the palm strike that travels through the air — means something else again: the various energies the body emits, including electromagnetic waves, pressure waves and some forms of biological energy we do not yet understand. And some uses of qi describe behavior or state of mind: high morale, admirable courage, the public mood, a certain presence about someone, and so on.
The usual way of practicing qigong today is to follow a teacher in adjusting your posture, the pace of your breathing, and your state of mind — emptying it out, or moving it quickly — so that the body enters what is called the resonant state or the state of stillness. In the resonant state, practitioners often report a current of qi traveling the Ren and Du meridians and the Eight Extraordinary Vessels, along with warmth and a tightening of the muscles. That much is a tangible, physiological experience.
2. So what is chi?
Taoism has held since ancient times that "the primordial chi arises from the void". In this account, chi (炁) is a metaphysical energy, the innate chi that exists in the cosmos: so vast nothing lies outside it, so small nothing lies within it, without beginning or end, without color or taste, and yet the original impetus behind everything that comes into being and passes away — the wellspring of the Tao. The chi of the void, on this view, has to mix with the qi inside the body before it can act on a person, and it is the chi of the void that leads. That chi, refined from the essence of grain, becomes the energetic chi and the informational chi generated by cellular metabolism: "where chi gathers, there is life; where chi disperses, life ends". So the Taoist chi is the innate, pre-natal qi, while the qi of qigong is the acquired, post-natal kind.
In Taoist self-cultivation, chi is also described as a healing energy, an inexhaustible current running through everything in the universe. In qigong, breath work, daoyin and seated meditation, the qi being spoken of is this current of chi, and the tradition holds that movement and intention working together produce a healing effect that lifts a person's condition. The difficulty is that Taoism describes all this in marvelous terms, while ordinary people are left confused. You can feel qi gathering in the dantian when you practice qigong, but nobody can tell you what the chi that comes from the void actually is, and nobody can feel it.
3. Finding that the wall-crossing X information is chi in its intangible form
Every biochemistry textbook tells us the same thing: antigen-antibody reactions work on a lock-and-key principle. Two molecules are complementary in shape, one the key and one the lock. Once the key finds the lock and the two fit together, a complicated cascade of biochemistry follows.
Lock and key sounds simple enough, but it does not really add up. Opening a lock with a key is easy for a person; for molecules in solution it is anything but. Consider: nobody is holding the antibody. It comes tumbling through the fluid, while the antigen sways on the cell wall. It is as though we were swinging a key on a keyring at a lock that is itself swinging — lining it up with the keyhole would be extraordinarily hard. And yet biochemical reactions seem to happen rather quickly. What is going on? Might there be a second channel helping the reaction along?
Suppose, for instance, that the antibody only has to strike the cell wall anywhere. The antibody carries a second kind of information, call it X information, which travels along the cell wall, and when it meets the antigen the chemical reaction follows. That would raise the reaction rate substantially.
I use the term X information for this mysterious signal. In 2014 (see chapter four of The Science of Qigong) we found that the X information of the endothelin molecule really did appear to cross a solid barrier: it passed through a PDMS membrane 1,900 times as thick and reached the growth chamber above, where it reacted with PC-3 cancer cells. The results supported the existence of the mysterious X information. On our account, X information is the torsion field spacetime structure of the endothelin molecule. It bridges the interface between the real and imaginary spacetimes, moving through imaginary spacetime along the virtual image of the membrane, and so passes through walls in real spacetime unobstructed.
From this we can sketch out an account of what qigong practitioners are doing. Moving the qi in qigong is a physiological process taking place in real spacetime; the aim, as the tradition describes it, is to clear the meridians and lay down a highway for X information to travel on. Once that highway is open, the X information of the void — chi — can move at speed through the virtual-image world of the meridian system, and take on the work of coordinating between the body's various systems.
To my mind, the puzzle of chi and qi that Taoism has posed since antiquity finds its answer in the discovery of X information.
