Sean Martinson

Tai Chi paper

The Restricting Valve
Aldous Huxley, great dystopian author and psychological theorist, wrote in his book The Doors
of Perception that:
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the
outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human
being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and
unconditionally, by Mind at Large this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and
especially to the intellectual.
Huxley's book argues that the normal functions of the human mind, to ensure survival and to
contemplate words and human constructs, only serve to restrict the mind from fully perceiving the truth
of the world around us. This is what Tai Chi represents to me, a meditative attempt to escape from the
shackles of our own perception. The function of the mind as a sort of restricting valve serves not only
as a metaphor for our perception of the world around us but also could more literally talk about the
kinds of energies that we can draw in from the universe. I argue that the gathering and cleansing of
energy in our bodies that Tai Chi is based upon relies on our ability to meditatively shut down the
restricting valve that is the mind and allow energy and light to flow through us unrestricted.
When one can truly shut down the minds restrictive functions, you can enter a state of intense
connectedness, as described by Loren Eiseley in her essay The Flow of the River. She says
Once in a lifetime, perhaps, one escapes the actual confines of the flesh. Once in a lifetime, if
one is lucky, one so merges with sunlight and air and running water that whole eon, the eons
that mountains and deserts know, might pass in a single afternoon without discomfort. The mind
has sank away into its beginnings among old roots and obscure tricklings and movings that stir
inanimate things.

This, I believe, is the kind of experience that Tai Chi, and many other forms of meditation, are
attempting to attain. Eiseley's idea of the sunlight and air merging with the body are prevalent in Tai
Chi's forms and philosophy, which detail the drawing in of energy from the universe around us. The
ultimate goal of Tai Chi, for me at least, is to attain a state of complete synergy with the universe,
allowing energy not just to be cycled through your body, but to allow the universe's Chi to flow directly
through it, like a conduit. As Eiseley said, this experience could seem to take eons, you would feel the
entire world around you and your connection to it all.
As Huxley said, this experience would be one of inestimable value, although he claimed it
would be best for intellectuals, I believe this kind of experience is once-in-a-lifetime and that all
humans should attempt to achieve this state, whether through meditation or prayer or whatever else will
help you to open yourself to the rest of the universe, to allow the universe's energy to flow through you,
everyone should at least try to see the world without perceiving it.