title: What Is Qi? An Abstraction.
tags: taiji qi abstraction

If we read the Wikipedia entry for Qi, we read
```bookquote Wikipedia page on Qi
In the Sinosphere, qi is traditionally believed to be a vital force part of all living entities. Literally meaning 'vapor', 'air', or 'breath', the word qi is polysemous, often translated as 'vital energy', 'vital force', 'material energy', or simply 'energy'. Qi is also a concept in traditional Chinese medicine and in Chinese martial arts. The attempt to cultivate and balance qi is called qigong.
```
This is almost saying that qi is a 'mysterious mystical magic fairy force that only superstitions new age hippies believe in', or some such. As such, it is almost useless as a concept to a modern Western mind. Here I want to give a quite different take on what the word *qi* might refer to in context of my Taiji practice, and Taiji in general. In fifteen years of regular classes with my teacher, Luke Shepherd, I don't think *qi* was mentioned once during the actual class (only once, after one lesson, he mentioned that he does not use a 'abstraction' like qi). It was only much later that the connection between these two words 'qi' and 'abstraction' finally chimed. As such, what I explain here will take exactly that picture: *qi as an abstraction*. But in order to explain qi in that way,
it is necessary to explain what this word 'abstraction' means in this context.

## Abstraction
Consider a file on your computer. What is it? You may answer that it is a 'collection of binary data', but then that simply *moves the uncertainty*: we now need to ask 'what is binary data'. Now binary data is something like an ordered collection of bits, a bit having a value of 0 or 1. But then that is still abstract: in an electronic computer, at some point, those 0's and 1's will be represented in some way by electrical signals. It isn't even the case that the mapping is one-to-one. Then, in the case of storage, there are a few common means of storing data One is a spinning disk drive, which uses magnetic charges in metal oxide as a means of storage. Another is dynamic memory, another static memory, another is flash storage like an SSD or an SD card. Another is the way information is represented on optical media like a DVD. And to the user, no matter how stored, a file appears as just that: a file.

A file is an example of what one would call an *abstraction*: the user simply thinks in terms of its contents, and where it is located, and everything else is handled behind the scenes by the operating system and the hardware. Abstractions like these are absolutely pervasive in modern computing. Essentially everything of meaning to a computer programmer or user is an abstraction of some sort, usually built upon other abstraction, which are in turn built upon more abstractions.

Another example of an abstraction to ponder, this time from mathematics, is the number. What exactly is the number 2 when it's at home. It's not a physical thing. It has no single representation in language. All we know about it, essentially it's defining property, is that it is the *number that comes after 1*. As for 1, depending on where we start counting, 1 is either the *number that comes after 0*, or it is the *number that we start counting at*. Mathematics is the art of abstraction and logic, and numbers are just a useful and pervasive tool in doing that.
But to the mind of someone numerate, 1 is just as real a thing as your name, and likely just as real as a flower in your front garden.

The thing is, to our Mind, all is abstraction in some way or other. We are on side of our brain, perceiving things and intending things, and the neurological input and output of our brains is on the other. We have essentially no direct experience of how our brain talks to our body, and no direct experience of how our body interacts with the world around it. Even the concept of 'my body' is just a common mental abstraction that we think in terms of. At the physical level, atoms and subatomic particles do not have owners, or labels with people's names and addresses on. The physical universe has no concept of ownership, and so as the physical level, the concept of 'my body' does not exist. And so it is with essentially all abstractions: they exist in Mind, not in physical reality.

## Qi in Taiji
The starting point for my explanation of qi as it pertains to Taiji, is the saying: **The Mind Moves The Qi, and The Qi Moves The Body**. What does this mean? Eventually my current viewpoint is that it is describing a kind of *abstraction layer*. To recall the computer file example, the operating system's filesystem presents an abstraction to software: programs interact with the filesystem, and the filesystem then interacts with the raw storage devices; and also at the user interface level: the user interacts with Explorer or Finder windows (or some other file manager), and then the file manager program interacts with the operating system on the user's behalf. The user simply thinks in terms of clicking or dragging and dropping, and that is all they know, and all they need to know. The rest is hidden on the other side of the abstraction. To me, qi is like that. As such then, it is not innate, we are not born with it, but we must construct or cultivate this mental abstraction layer, and with time and practice, just like the files on our computer seem real to a seasoned user, so *qi as a mental abstraction* becomes seemingly-real to the practitioner of an art such as Taiji or Qigong.