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Feeling entirely certain of our own motivations is a strong sign we are deluding ourselves. Pretty much nothing we do is based on a single, pure emotion or concern. Our feelings are never one-dimensional, our reasons for what we do never simple. Yet understanding our motivation is a big piece of understanding ourselves and an absolute prerequisite to real rectification. As always, step one is to relax. During meditation we have an opportunity to really ask ourselves why we’re doing something. In the peace and quiet of the meditative stance, we can find the space to discover the layers of truth in our lives. Experience, perspective, mood, and circumstance lend different shades, casts, and insights to what we see and how we see it. Let’s recognize that even feelings or convictions we consider fixed and inviolable may well change or become irrelevant one day. This is because we are subject to cycles, contracting and expanding, rising and falling. The more extreme the highs we reach, the more compensatory the lows will be. The farther to the right we move, the more we can expect a shift to the left, and vice versa. Let’s come to see ourselves not as steel but as water, shifting, changing, evolving, reversing and being flexible enough to bend and fold with the times. Daoist rectification is all about being like water.
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Passionate enthusiasm is the greatest source of energy but can also be the antithesis of relaxation. Ramped up, we may think superficial thoughts and make irrational decisions. Instead of becoming lost in feelings of optimism and personal power, why not use the energy passion provides to explore the yin and yang of our emotional register, the inevitable falling away of a positive mood in favor of a dour one? Can we find reassurance in that cycle? Can we find the passionate times all the more precious because they are fleeting? Can we remember them when we feel down and know they will return? When we feel low, can we relish the opportunity to rectify ourselves in the solemn focus of the moment? When it is time to rest and recuperate, let’s do that. When it’s time to go crazy, let’s do that, too. High or low, let’s sense the sublime all-pervasive breathing of the universe—in and out, standing for happy and for sad. This sensing is a passion itself, a passion for Dao.
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The more predictably we behave on the outside, the less likely we are to be in tune with nature. This is because—large forces like magnetism, gravity, and the cycling of seasons aside—the progression of natural events is generally chaotic. Therefore, let’s not worry if our desks are messy. Let’s not fret if all our tools are not lined up inside drawers. Let’s not waste time ordering all the books on our shelves or the songs on our playlists. Let’s not take the same route to work every day. Let’s not always insist upon the same table at our favorite eatery. Let’s not fixate on one brand of shoe to the exclusion of others. Let’s not squander our energy attempting to order a fundamentally disordered universe. Instead, let’s use meditation and exercise to rectify ourselves, to find what is constant and true within, and thereby create internal coherence and stability. In this way, we will be able to effortlessly flow with the vicissitudes and challenges of life while growing inside in harmony with the ever-expanding universe.
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In groundbreaking research in the latter part of the twentieth century, Nobel laureate Dr. Wilder Penfield attempted to map the connections between specific parts of the body and particular areas of the brain. He wanted to see, for example, where the “wires” from the hand led, and where the connections to the feet ended up. To produce his map, Penfield had to be able to talk to his subjects while working on them. A needle stuck in a particular part of the brain might make a patient feel hungry or make her feel as if her fingers were on fire, but Penfield could only know this if the patient was awake and communicative. Fortunately, while the skull has sensory nerves in it, the brain does not, so Penfield could numb the skull, and go ahead and poke away without causing the patient pain.
Penfield’s poking and talking routine gave him the information he was after along with an additional surprise, namely that the patient was able to announce what he was experiencing. Rather than simply saying, “Yum, mustard,” for example, the patient was able to say, “When you use that needle, I taste mustard on my tongue.” Penfield got to wondering who was speaking and who was the “I” to which the speaker was referring. Put another way, what person was it who was watching the experiment from afar and reporting on the effects of his needle? He realized that in order to phrase things that way, the patient had to be watching the experiment unfold from some place deep either within or high above.
There’s more. When Penfield stimulated a place in the brain that made the patient clench his fist, then said, “Look, I’m going to do that again, this time try to resist the clenching,” the fist clenched to a lesser extent. Because of the way the patient reacted, Penfield inferred that the person whose hand was moving, and the person who was trying to stop the hand from moving, were in some fashion not one and the same. Penfield called the person he was talking to the “watcher.”
Depending upon how much experience we have meditating, we soon discover that we can watch ourselves watch ourselves watch ourselves, and so on. Daoists make the same observation Penfield did and take it a step or two further. In our tradition, the first level of occurrence is the external, objective fact—there is a table. The second level is the sensory register of that fact or event—seeing the table, for instance. The third level is interpreting what we see—“Ah. That’s a table.” The fourth level is the emotion that arises—“What a beautiful table!” The last, fifth level, applies to our response to the previous four—“I move that table so the puppy doesn’t chew on its legs.”
Once we understand that there is a watcher, many previously impossible tasks become trivial. Moreover, experiences we may have had, like time slowing down during a mortal encounter of a car accident or shoot-out, make a new kind of sense. Given this hygiene of distance, keeping our equilibrium becomes much, much easier. Dangerous and stressful events have less immediacy, leaving us free to respond rather than react, and to stay calm and make better decisions. Last but not least, we can, at any moment, find new coaches in our efforts to relax and rectify ourselves. We have only to check in with our watchers.
Cycles and Motion
Many Western exercise programs emphasize the way the body looks as opposed to the way it functions, isolating muscle groups with specific exercises and sometimes even puffing us up with artificial nutrients and stimulant drugs. This method appeals more to vanity than to good sense, benefiting appearance over function. Instead, let’s see the body and the way it works in terms of systems, not individual organs or anatomical structures. Tai chi, qigong, and the herbs and acupuncture pull together organs, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and bones. Linked properly to the mind, the entire body becomes healthier and stronger, and performance improves. This is real rectification.
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The burgeoning field of epigenetics tells us that our DNA is not a life sentence written in stone, but more a loose guide to our characteristics, health, and disease. As we interact with our environment, our lifestyle, feelings, and thoughts switch our genes on and off. In this heady respect, we literally are what we think and feel. Interactive genetic mutability has health, longevity, and spiritual enlightenment resting upon a foundation of a calm mind and a life lived in harmony with nature rather than one in opposition to it. Unquestioningly accepting stereotypes limits us in so very many ways. The narratives we tell ourselves about our physical abilities, the inevitability of our genetics, the limitations of our circumstances and educations, are all wrong and needlessly constrain us. Relaxing turns off dangerous genes. Rectifying ourselves means understanding that while our genetic code may be written, how it is expressed depends upon our reactions to stress and what we do to reject what others have told us are our limits. The first step in growing past old boundaries, breaking old bonds, and rejecting stories we tell ourselves and stereotypes others apply to us is to understand that we are changing and evolving in each moment of our lives. The step after that is to take conscious and deliberate control of that change through the various suggestions offered here.
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The inevitability of aging turns out to be a fallacy. Despite popular belief, older people’s brains don’t become slow and weak but rather