What Is Qi?

Note that the following is my opinion, and being no master in an art such as Taiji, what I say may be completely wrong, but I want to share my thoughts for whatever they are worth.

If we read the Wikipedia entry for Qi, we read

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. When I refer to these two concepts, I shall hyphenate thus: 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, a mental abstraction. As such then, it is not innate, we are not born with it, nor is a physical thing we can measure like magnetism, 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.

Abstract Convergence

It is also necessary, from my viewpoint, to consider qi as both a single abstract concept, and a collection of related abstract concepts. For me, with my mathematical background, I would describe this as a concept which captures convergence in the sense of a system, whose state evolves in time according to some reasonably defined rule, converges to some state or path. There are many examples, and qi is the abstract concept that these have in common:

1. A self-balancing scooter. This consists of: an accelerometer which measures which way is down and thus supplies the microcontroller with 'Awareness' of its orientation; the microcontroller is programmed to try to keep the scooter upright, while its orientation is being perturbed by the movements of the rider, and as such, the upright position is the target or 'Intention' of the scooter; then the microcontroller sends signals to a motor controller which in turn controls the motors, which is what I call the 'Action' of the device, that is, the action it takes to converge towards its Intention. The qi of the system is that corrective force pulling it upright, and an imaginary 'mind stuff', or qi flow, which flows along the direction that the device will take to converge on its Intention.
2. A dynamical system in mathematics. Here the current state corresponds to the Awareness, and it doesn't matter from a mathematical point of view how that Awareness is obtained, only what the current state is. The current state then determines the future state by a rule defined by a set of differential equations, and those equations determine the future direction of the system. Such a system may exhibit attractors, which pull the state towards it, or repellors, which push the state away from it. If there is a desired state, or set of states which we wish the system to converge on, then we could consider that state to be our Intention, and in seeking to realise this Intention, we attempt to tune the rule by which the system evolves so that it will converge on the state we intend it to, as such so that the Intention of the dynamical system coincides with our own Intention. When it comes to Taiji (or some other art which systematically trains qi), we are (or in my opinion we are supposed to be) tuning the Mind and brain in the hope that it learns to converge on our own Intention, and thus we are training our Mind Intention to follow the Intention of our conscious self, and training our brain to translate that Mind Intention into Action, and this Action is, from the point of view of the brain, the neurological output of the brain to the body through the nervous system.
3. Biological Evolution. If we take the point of view of Dawkins' Selfish Gene, that genes are molecular patterns whose sole purpose is to survive and reproduce, and biological organisms are simply vehicles for genes to do that, then the Intention of a gene is to survive and reproduce. Biological Evolution then causes species genetics to converge upon genetic patterns which aid the survival of those genes. The 'Awareness' is simply the existence of organisms carrying those genes (which is, I know, a long way from the conventional meaning of 'awareness', but the idea here is that Awareness is part of an Awareness-Intention-Comparison-Action feedback loop, and that this feedback loop pattern is common to all things to which the concept of qi pertains).
4. Phase Locked Loop. A way of generating a signal of a precise frequency is to have a device whose input and output are compared such that if the output frequency deviates from its intended frequency, a corrective signal is generated which moves the frequency towards its intended frequency. The output of the loop is the Awareness, the desired frequency is the Intention, and the control signal is the Action.
5. Lorenz Attractor. This is a famous relatively simple dynamical system which exhibits chaotic behaviour. The attractor (which we will equate with the Intention of the system) is a butterfly-shaped pattern that points in the phase space of the system will flow around once they are near to it. If you start anywhere in the space space, the point will move towards the attractor, and once close will remain close. (Technical note, about which I may be mistaken. In reality, no point that is not exactly on the attractor to begin with ever ends up exactly on the attractor, but rather any point in the phase space tends towards to attractor until it is numerically indistinguishable from a point exactly on the attractor.)
6. Sierpinski Gasket. This is a famous picture of triangles within triangles. One way in which it is produce is via an iterative process. In this iterative process, we pick three points in space which define a triangle (so they are not all in a line). We then, at each step, pick one of the points at random, and move our point halfway towards it. If we repeat this for a large number of starting points, the resulting position of the points after a few hundred iterations will resemble the triangle-within-triangle picture. Another way this picture can be produced is to start with a filled triangle, divide it into four equal triangles, remove the middle triangle, and then repeat the process with the remaining three triangles, and then keep applying this procedure recursively. In the case of the gasket, the triangle pattern is the Intention, the current state is the Awareness, and the movement towards the gasket is the Action.

There are many more such concepts. The basic picture of qi then is the (imaginary) 'stuff that flows towards the target pattern'. The behaviour of the system then follows where this qi directs it, in the sense that say a tangent field of a differential equation directs solutions of that equation. As it pertains to Taiji, the idea is that, by integrating our Awareness of our body, its position in space and the sensations we feel, with a clear Intention, in the sense of where we intend our body to be, and what we intend to feel, we train ourselves so that based on our Awareness and Intention, we generate movement or changes in the signals we send our body (aka Action) so that the resulting Awareness-Intention system converges upon our Intention. The difference between arts like Taiji and Qigong, as compared to others, is the deliberate cultivation and utilisation of this feedback-stabilisation effect, and in some cases the aim is to use this feedback-stabilisation effect exclusively when we stand and move.