THE PRIMER PROJECT
Unifying Theory
of the Human Organism and Behavior.
Volume 10(Unpublished)
Chapter 3. MASS-ENERGY, QI, AND QIMASS
by Ralph Siu
The uniqueness of human behaviour as the involvement of virtual presences has been described in the preceding chapter. However, uniqueness does not mean completeness. There are many other aspects of human behaviour that are not unique to the species but are shared with other beings as kindred in the Tao. We shall now proceed with our conceptualization of the human being in one`s wholeness.
Our approach echoes the underlying theme of continuous change in the oldest existing book of Chinese antiquity, the I Ching or Book of Changes372. All behaviour, be it inanimate, plant, animal, or human, is a manifestation of changes in state. To understand behaviour is to grasp the nature of the stuffs undergoing change and the associated process. This chapter is devoted to a discussion of these stuffs, followed by an elaboration of the process of assimilation in Chapters 4 through 9 and three case illustrations of the application of the theory and vocabulary in Chapter 10.
As far as the ingredients of change are concerned, mass-energy is now universally accepted as essential. Most natural scientists would go even further. They would explain all changes as transformations of mass-energy alone –be they animate or inanimate, human or plant, mental or physical.
These assertions, however, appear to be largely based on circular reasoning. Mass-energy has been defined solely by techniques devised for the measurement of changes in inanimate systems. Having achieved often terrifying success in the manipulation of inanimate systems, using theories invoking only mass-energy as the stuff of change, the scientific enthusiasts have been trying to impose the same exclusive framework upon the living, behaving, and thinking organisms.
Intellectually dominant elites throughout the ages have always been similarly tempted. Everything is to be explained their way and theirs alone. Every secret is to be opened by their bag of tricks and theirs alone. So it was that the medieval scholars of Christianity insisted that the rotation of the planets and all other physical phenomena must conform to their own biblical interpretations. And so it is today that the twentieth century scholars of the natural sciences insist that the behaviour of human beings and all other living phenomena must conform to their own mass-energy model. Just as the medieval scholastics had proclaimed that their biblical account of the universe was complete, the scientific counterparts of today are proclaiming that their physicalistic account is complete.
The philosopher Feigl 244 dissected the tautological claim of the radical physicalists. It “amounts to a truism….that there can be nothing within the intersubjective-physicalistic account of the world that is not intersubjective-physicalistic.” We would be less confused if we recognize the game being played. “These admittedly keen and clear-headed philosophers (and alas, often unwittingly) apply the `Hylas Touch`! No wonder then that whatever they deal with turns out to be physical !”
The usual support advanced for the natural scientist`s exclusive posture is “experimental demonstration. One is able to show the otherwise skeptical naturalist and humanist that by injecting chemical A into the subject`s brain, certain behavioural manifestations can be induced. This is taken to demonstrate that human behaviour can be explained purely on the basis of the metabolism of chemical A alone. That therefore mass-energy alone suffices to explain behaviour.
A closer examination would reveal a logical sleight-of-hand. The complete experimental replication of the assemblage of causal factors have been waved out of sight. Another incomplete substitute is introduced for the audience to behold. The former reality includes not only the mass-energy of chemical A but also the unidentified complex of unknown factors comprising the experimenter himself and the rest of the experimental subject.
To be more complete and precise about the translation of laboratory findings to linving systems, we should postulate an organismic operation involving factors corresponding not only to the identified mass-energy or chemical A and other physical paramters in the usual experimental model, but also the unidentified cluster of factors belonging to the “mind” and other components of the experimenter and experimental subject. Removing the experimenter from the scene will not induce the behavioural response to occur, just as removing chemical A will not. Nor will replacing the experimenter with a chimpanzee, just as replacing chemical A with chemical B will not. It is clear therefore that the purported sufficiency of mass-energy of chemical A alone had not been “experimentally demonstrated”. What was demonstrated was that chemical A was one of the causal ingredients in conjunction with the rest – but not that the rest are all similar to chemical A in being purely of a mass-energy nature.
We are not surprised to observe therefore that the natural scientist of exclusive mass-energy is most fluent on those aspects of a living human being that are shared with a cadaver and less with those shared with a living butterfly. He is even more inarticulate on those aspects that we have come to respect as quitessentially human. “Science can �explain` thunderstorms, but can it `explain` the fear with which people react to them?” asked the composer-conductor Bernstein.67 And how about “the sense of glory we feel in a thunderstorm?”
My own personal hopes in the power of physical explanations of human behaviour restricted to transformations of mass-energy alone have long gone unrealized. As a physical scientist and director of large research and engineering activities, covering practically all of the natural sciences over several decades, I have never had the gratification of listening to a convincing explanation of this kind. Yet most of my good scientist-friends refuse to concede that some additional stuff of metabolic change besides mass-energy may - just may - - be involved in living and thinking processes.
It would appear, that allowing that mass-energy is necessary but not necessarily sufficient to explain human behaviour would seem more in keeping with the customary open-mindedness expected of scientists and scholars. Even among the highly rigorous physicists, the postulating of as yet unrecognized existences is standard practice. When the known nuclear particle cannot satisfactorily account for the charge, mass, spin, and other properties of the overall system, a new particle is hypothesized and sought in empirical verification.
The physicist is never adamant at any stage that the then known particles will suffice to clarify all future physical events without the need to postulate new entities. Nor does the neurobiologist proclaim in the midst of his dramatic progress that the ,brain” will be completely understood without the use of any new tools beyond the current microscope, selective staining, and microelectrode.
Actually, modern thinkers have long given up insisting on ,sensibility“ as an essential criterion of ,reality” and a sole basis for ,intelligibility“. As discussed by Hutchison 365, Isaac Newton himself had ,sough `two or three` universal occult [insensible] causes, as exemplified in the gravitational force he discovered and in the chemical and optical forces he continually searched for. Not only do such causes have real exploratory powers, even if interpreted nominalistically, but their existence can be soundly confirmed by the accumulation of evidence”.
In the face of centuries of disappointment with mass-energy as the sole basis for the elucidation of life, quite a number of natural scientists has become quite modest about the power of the laws governing the changes in mass-energy, when it comes to an understanding of living processes. At the moment when Einstein 217 completed his general theory of relativity, an ordinary housefly landed on the paper. He reflected how little he did know, despite all the major physical laws set down before him, about the nature of that little fly.
To persist in the refusal to distinguish the processing of mass-energy alone from that involving something else as well, to borrow a simile from the Arab philosopher al-Ghazali 279 , is like an ant crawling over a sheet of paper and ascribing the letters to the production of the pen and nothing else.
It might well be that this something else may turn out to be just a variant of mass-energy or that mass-energy and this something else can both be subsumed into a single all-embracing as yet unknown realm of essences. Should either turn out to be the case, progress would not have been stymied in the interim on that account. We would have actually aided the clarification by looking at the same phenomen from two different vantage points. On the other hand, it might be that this something else is qualitatively different. We would then be much farther ahead for having proceeded on the basis of their dissimilarity.
We shall begin this development on a philosophically fundamental level. Let us invoke the old generalization of the Yin-Yang. Everything is made of the Yin and the Yang. There is no Yin without a Yang and no Yang without a Yin. Everything is Yin-Yang.
This principle has been empirically verified over the millennia and repeatedly reincarnated in various forms across the scope of human thought, from ancient biblical conceptualizations to modern nuclear theory 137 . To philosophers since time immemorial, to mention good implies the existence of evil. To us at this point of interest, to mention mass-energy implies the existence of something that is not mass-energy.
The time appears ripe to introduce that nonmass-energy stuff of metabolism to complete our picture of human behaviour as a change in state. The search has long been underway among Western investigators. Miller 517 , for example, ordered his description of living system with the dichotomy of mass-energy and something he called ,information“. The old Eastern masters might have had something of more direct relevance for our consideration.
Chinese literature is filled with references to an intangible ch `i (pronounced chee , as in cherio). The term has been variously translated into such expressions as: vital force, cosmic vitality, passion of nature, principle of novelty, spirit of life, ether filling the sky, and great breath of the universe. The loosely definded vital force has been applied over a wide range of interests from sex to politics.
Practitioners of Chinese calisthenics spoke about mobilizing the ch`i and gathering it into the bones. The art instructor LiuTao?-ch`un 470 taught his pupils in the tenth century that ,Action of the ch`i and powerfull brushwork go together”. The seventeenth century scholar-painter Wang Y�an-chi introduced the abstract ch`i shih , or ,breath force“ into his landscape paintings, using interwined mountains as ,dragon veins” through which the ,breath force“ flows. The Japanese swordmaster Tajima no kami Munenori 856 noted in his treatise on the ,mystical sword” in the seventeenth century that there are uninhibited factors ,besides merely mastering the technique, which constitutes the marvels of ch` i“. To the Chinese peasant, no ch`i no life.
Old alchemy texts referred to the transformations of ch`i in the realization of one`s full potentialities. The following is a typical passage from the Book of the Golden Elixir: 92 ,With the transmutation of ching [essence] into ch`i [vitality], the first barrier is passed and perfect stillness of body supervenes. With the transmutation of ch`i into seen [spirit], the middle barrier is passed and perfect stillness of heart supervenes. With the transmutation of shen into the void, the final barrier is passed and mind and Mind are unified. Thus is the elixir perfected and immortality attained. This is the true significance of the sacred practice of cultivating and nourishing; it has nothing to do with compounding an actual pill”.
Taoist adepts discussed the transformations of ch`i and techniques for influencing them. They alluded to the ch`i of temper, vengefulness, rage, and other ,coarse“ forms and cautioned against interference with their transmutation into the desirable ,subtle” forms 78 .
Various methods were used in the control of the different types if ,breaths“. All men, wise or foolish, know that their bodies contain ethereal [hun] as well gross [pho] breaths [souls], and that when some of them quit the body, illness ensues; and when they all leave him, a man dies”, stated
Ko 422 of the fourth century. , In the former case, the magicians have amulets for restraining them; in the latter case, The Rites provide ceremonials for summoning them back.
We may draw the inference that this ch`i is the raw material, which is modified during human manifestations and activities. Our first step in the scientific adaption of these Taoist concepts into a coherent picture of human behaviour then is to conceive this stuff ch`i as a basic essence. This I shall call gi (also pronounced chee, but spelled according to the current official pinyin transliteration of ch�, the former Wade-Giles transliteration, which I had used in my earlier texts 711, 712).
Qui is defined as the non-mass-energy stuff of metabolism, which together with mass-energy comprises the basic metabolites of living organisms.
Some qualitative inkling of the distinction between mass-energy and qui might be gathered from the difference in the production of physical sound and music. In an inanimate context, such as tuning forks, the same equation of motion objectively describes the manifestations of the processing of mass-energy, regardless of the kinds and sequences of sounds. In a human context, however, something new is subjectively created when certain combinations and sequences of sounds are presented. The human being is able to transform something other than mass-energy alone into a heretofore nonexistent entity - - a song.
Just as the physiologist investigates the reactions of the body by analyzing the metabolism of mass-energy molecules and the psychiatrists follows the changes of the personality by dissecting the transformation of the egos, we may study the reactions of the psyche through the metabolism of qui and the behaviour of the human being by the integrated metabolism of both classes of reactants, which give rise to the manifestations of life and behaviour. The metabolism of qui and mass-energy within an integrated wholeness gives rise to and sustains a living organism. The living organism therefore is distinguished from the inanimate and the tead world as the only system that assimilates both qui and mass-energy into the living substance of quimass and of one kind of qui, mass-energy and quimass into other kinds.
This ,scientific“ hypothesis is related to what Jung 390 was driving at when he depicted the psyche as consisting ,essentially of images. It is a series of images in the trues sense, not an accidental juxtaposition of sequence, but a structure that is throughout full of meaning and purpose. And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that ist images may life”.
A healthy life is maintained by the assimilitation of qui, mass-energy, and quimass in smoothly operating system. which produces ,normal“ metabolic products of qui, mass-energy and quimass (as in living body tissues, ova, sperms and offsprings). A deficiency in the supply of either qui, mass-energy, or quimass leads to impoverished living. Disorders in the capacity of metabolism of any of the associated constituents and inputs bring about illness and / or other functional aberrations, as in the production of hallucinating qui and mongoloid quimass. The destruction of the capacity finally leads to death and the person dissolves, leaving one`s final contributions in the mass-energy, qui, and quimass of the cosmic reservoir.
A couple of examples may help to demonstrate the difference between the , livingness” of quimass and the , nonlivingness“ of mass-energy. The first pertains to tissue and organ transplants. In order for a heart to be successfully transplanted from one body to a living individuaal, it must be ,living”, even after having been separated from the donor`s body for some time. Once the organ is allowed to pass that point of ,still life-containing“, and thereby transformed from quimass into mass-energy, it is not ,accepted” into the quimass-metabolizing system of the recipient. The transplant will not take.
Furthermore, given a living and compatible quimass, the transplanted quimass responds as a intimate and natural part of the new home. A part of a liver transplanted into a child will grow with it and function as a normal liver into adulthood.
The second example is drawn from studies on pineapple plants. When a large chunk of the stalk of a pineapple plant with only a single bud is buried in the soil, it will continue to grow into a normal plant, as long as the small bud is left undamaged and alive. The large stalk will not be attacked by the microorganisms in the soil. But should the bud be killed by a prick or two of a needle, the entire stalk will immediately ,die“. The microorganisms in the soil will promptly begin to decay the entire stalk. The once living gimass had been changed into inanimate mass-energy of carbohydrates and other nutrients for the microbial flora.
Being other than mass-energy, qui itself cannot be measured by the conventional instruments of the natural sciences. Temperature, weight, and length can say nothing about the qui associated with decorum and civility. ,Can you show me a sense datum; or at least give some identifying marks so that I will be able to finish one out of my own stream of consciousness?” asked Thalberg 769 . ,[Do] your visual images have spatial dimensions? Depth?“
Measuring the spatial dimensions of the eyes is not the same as assimilatin the qui behind the gaze. There is a striking transphysical reality to the gaze. Heron 335 identified it as luminosity, the intensity of which ,is coterminous with the activity of consciousmess itself”. There is a streaming quality during the encounters of mutual gazing. The interfusing of the whole being of one by the other and vice versa ,constitutes the dramatic �lan of true encounter between persons“. According to Stack and Plant 730 , there is a phenomenological continuum among living species ,extending from defensive eye patterns in insects and animals to responses to gaze in animals and typical responses of human beings to being the object of the stars or gaze of others”.
The transmission and assimilation of qui were portrayed by the novelist Joyce 389 in the following scene: , A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still…..Her thighs, fuller an softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down….when she felt his presence and the worship of his eves turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither…….Her image had passed into his soul for ever“. Public affirmation of the presence and identity of a particular kind of qui in the empirically verifiable sense can be indirectly inferred through observations on the associated behavioural displays. The method is basically not too unlike that of the physical sciences, as in the characterization of the unseen electron through its effectuated white streak in a cloud chamber. To be sure, the observed signs are not mistaken for the qui itself. The frown is not equated with the qui of the disgust, just as the vapor trail is not equated with the mass-energy of the electron.
When the particular entity under observation is a ,single” qui, then the noted manifestation may be said to reflect the properties of that particular kind of qui, analogous to the electron described above. When the qui is only one of the many ingredients that go to make up the outward expression, we would not expect to find a one-to-one correspondence between a particular species of qui alone being transformed and a particular state.
Casually comparable outward manifestations may actually stem from different states of internal feelings and therefore different kinds of qui being assimilated. The multiplicity of qui involved in smiling is shown by the wide range of terms used by people in describing their own feelings at a given time while smiling and laughing, such as angry, anxious, ,can`t describe“, self-conscious, putting oneself down, embarrassed, funny, good, happy, and ridiculous 486. The fact that they all end up with a common output of smiles and laughter suggest that there are probably at least one or more kinds of qui that is common in all of their metabolisms in conjunction with other qui and mass-energy.
Yet it may turn out that a fine-grained analysis of the smiles and laughter would show that they do vary in detail, depending on the underlying feeling. In this case, the critical qui would be unique to the associated state in question. This remains to be explored.
At the same time, the same kind of qui may find public expressions through different avenues, depending on the available instruments. An individual with facial paralysis would not be able to convey the qui of cheer through a smile. But one can certainly do so by dashing off a few suitable words. No one can claim to be overflowing with the qui of Confucian jen (human-heartedness) and yi (righteousness) but has no means of expressing them. There are ten thousand (as the Chinese would put it) ways of going about it.
Extensive theoretical studies and empirical observations over recent centuries have established the fact that the basic elements of mass-energy are the same in the inanimate, plants, animal and human realms. At the same time, these basic elements can be combined into innumerable compounds, many of which are usually found more prevalently in one group of organisms than in another. Proteins are present in living organisms as a rule and not in the inanimate world. The chlorophyll-protein complex is found in plants as a rule and not in animals. The reverse hods for the haemoglobin-protein complex. The question arises whether or not the same diversity holds for qui among species and individuals.
Having identified the creation of and response to virtual presences as uniquely human, we may divide the qui assimilated by human beings into two broad categories. These are: ( i ) those connected with the human being`s primitive animal ancestry and shared with other living organisms, and ( ii ) those associated with virtual presences and related therefore to the uniquely human nature. Each of these may in turn be subdivided into smaller groups, as more detailed studies are completed. But such refinements lie beyond our current state of the art.
Millennia ago, the Li Chi or Book of Rights 461 had identified two components of the human soul. One is the kuei [demon] and the other is the seen [spirit]. ,The `ch`i breath` is the full manifestation of the seen and the p`o is the full manifestation of the kuei. The union of the kuei and the seen is the highest of all tenets. Living beings are all sure to die, and as they certainly return to the earth after their death the soul which accompanies them thither is called kuei.” I we link the kuei more to the ,lower“ personality of the human being, we might consider ist substance to be the more animal qui. If we link the seen more to the ,higher” personality of the human being, we might consider ist substance to be the more human qui. This latter is associated with virtual presences.
There are also some apparent experimental indication for the two-fold division of qui. Lieblich 465 investigated the reactions of one individual toward another, who was being frustrated in each of twenty needs, as aroused in a series of stories. Eight responses were tested, namely, pity, attempt to help, reproach, withdrawal, disgust, mockery, anger and malicious joy.
Those motives which are most sensual, primitive or unlearned, and instinctive, such as sex and aggression, produced a flat reaction-profile. Those which are more socialized, sublimated, and self-actuated, such as nurturance and succor, produced stepwise reaction-profile. The former group may be considered as being more closely related to a person`s more animal qui and the latter to one`s more human qui.
In line with this segregation of metabolic stuffs, we may group the ways in which human beings exhibit themselves into three modes. When the stuffs of transformation are almost exclusively mass-energy, the display is of the inanimate mode. These manifestations, such as tumbling down the stairs and floating in the ocean, are basically similar to those of rocks and machines.
When the stuffs are almost exclusively mass-energy and qui shared with other living organisms, the display is of the animal mode. These manifestations, such as mating and yawning, are basically similar to those of animals. There is much of our cousin plants in us and even more of our brother animals, as well a lot of us in them both. Such a realization should stimulate an omnidirectional empathy among our kin and ourselves. Animals too should have claims of some kind on our morality 638 .
When the stuffs or transformation include a significant portion of qui associated with virtual presences, the display is of the human mode. It is only in the human mode, such as imagining and creating, that we are technically precise in referring to an individual as conducting oneself as a human being.
The inanimate mode is the prime focus of the physical sciences, while the animal mode is that for fields like biology, ecology and sociobiology. The human mode has been most successfully explicated and financially applied in the fields of art, music, literature, politics, business, and religion and to a lesser degree so far in the fields of philosophy and psychology. The divine mode, which lies beyond the scope of this book, has been largely reserved for theological and religious scholarship.
Considerable overlap is found in philosophical speculations, such as those of Mencius, Plotinus, and Kierkegaard. The Chinese philosopher Mencius (c. 371-c. 289 BC) hat emphasized that human beings possess the two aspects of ,animal“ and ,human” and that the former should not be confused as part of the ,human“ nature. Typical of this human nature is the sense of compassion. If an individual suddenly sees a child about to fall into a well, the former is seized with instinctive concern and rushes to help without thinking about reward and punishment.
The Confucianist concluded that ,he who is devoid of the sense of compassion is not a human being; he who is devoid of a sense of shame and revulsion is not a human being; he who is devoid of modesty and accommodation is not a human being; he who is devoid of a sense of right and wrong is not a human being. The sense of compassion is the beginning of human-heartedness; the sense of shame and revulsion is the beginning of righteousness; the sense of modesty and accommdation is the beginning of propriety; the sense of right and wrong is the beginning of wisdom. All human beings possess these four beginnings, just as they all possess four limbs”.
The Roman philosopher Plotinus ( 205 - 270 ) separated the soul from the body, yet emphasized the intimate unity of the two. Both the soul and the body are involved in sensations. But the soul is posited as superior to the body in the former`s grasp of imaginable and intellectual forms. He finally postulated the intellectual Principle or the Divine Mind as the nexus of all intellectual forms and therefore superior to the soul.
There is much in Plotinus 101a that anticipates our own theory.His analysis of contemplation is illustrative. The movements in a dance are grasped by sight. But their living wholeness is apprehended by the contemplative mind. This would correspond to our own categories of human behaviour in the inanimate-animal mode and human mode, respectively.
The Danish philosopher S�ren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855) envisioned the human being as standing between the inanimate world and God. Inanimate objects are simply what they are, since they cannot think and are therefore not conscious of their state. God, on the other hand, is completely Himself since he is what he thinks. The human being, in contrast to both, is never completely oneself. The person is forced to realize one`s own being by continually doing what one thinks. In effect, Kierkegaard had lumped our three modes of the inanimate, animal, and human into two, while adding a fourth divine mode. In his divine mode, metabolism would consist entirely of qui, without any mass-energy.
The laboratory findings of Van Galen and Hooper 793 may be relevant. They demonstrated that ,speech control does not occupy the same functional units of mechanisms of information-processing as external signals do“. The phylogenetically older system for such processing as locomotion and sensory adaption ,is characterized by working with values on a single dimension like distance, brightness, direction, area, etc. Transplanting input variables into output values can be done by analogous rules without a coding memory”.
In contrast, the phylogenetically newer telencephalic system for the perception of form and such learned movement patterns as handwriting ,is characterized by a set of features which can only be processed with the aid of memorized information“. There appears to be an approximate correspondence of the two systems to our animal and human modes, respectively.
Based on what has been said so far, we may surmise that there is potentially an infinite variety of qui. The power of our imagination is such that no matter how many virtual presences are at hand, we can imagine an additional one at the least, thereby producing new forms of qui. In order to smooth the way for the eventual conceptual integration of the metabolism of qui with that of mass-energy, we will describe the metabolic transformation of qui in a fashion paralleling that developed by chemists to portray the transformation of mass-energy.
Ignoring the quimass interactions for the time being, we begin by postulating that there are two structural classes of qui, namely elemental and compound. These may combine to produce more complicated qui. A more compound qui may exchange parts with others, rearrange itself internally to give rise to new forms, or disintegrate into elemental and / or simpler compound qui.
The elemental qui is in turn divided into two types, some with a Yin orientation and others with a Yang orientation. Elemental qui of the Yin orientation is naturally attracted to elemental qui of the Yang orientation and vice versa to form compound qui. Depending on the degree of extremeness in their respective polarities, a single elemental qui combines with one or more elemental or compound qui to form a new compound qui, thereby attaining a higher order of overall Yin-Yang harmony. We might even venture to conceive of the living organism as a single more or less harmonious quimass complex.
This portrayal of qui is analogous to that by chemists for the atoms and molecules of mass-energy. The atoms are divided in the Periodic Table of elements into two kinds. Some of them possess a negative charge (Yin) and others a positive charge (Yang). They combine to form mass-energy molecules with an overall neutral charge (Yin-Yang harmony).
We may speculate how in principle at least, some of the elemental and compound qui can be identified that unite with the mass-energy of atoms and molecules, other qui, and quimass in the human being.
Many of the qui affiliated with affections may be said to belong to the same group of compound qui, which share some common elemental or compound qui. This is indicated by their capacity to change into another. Elation may turn into ecstacy, anger into rage, sadness into melancholy, regret into remorse, and hope into desire.
Perhaps an analysis of Marshall`s list of affections 487 may factor out some common elemental or compound qui moieties as a point of departure. His inventory includes nostalgia, longing, doubt, confusion, disappointment, awareness of danger, guilt, fear, gloom, depression, grief, misery, revulsion, horror, annoyance, irritation, dislike, disapproval, disgust, contentment, quiet, pride, cheerfulness, delight, pleasure, fascination, respect, fellowfeeling, sympathy, generosity, and love.
A preliminary study of this kind on shame has been carried out by Max Scheeler. According to his assessment, in the words of Emad 221 , the “sense of shame stands in a unique relationship to pride and humility. It seems as if shame contains qualities from both of them. With pride it shares the awareness of one`s own value, and with humility, the tendency toward devotion and loyalty. Furthermore, shame is very close to repentance and to the feeling of honor. In repenting, one is also ashamed of oneself. A sense of shame is ordinarily paralleled by a sense of honor, while shamelessness is accompanied by an absence of honor”.
If we incorporate Scheeler`s view into our scheme, we might say that pride, humility, repentance, and honor are all behavioural manifestations of the metabolism of at least one or more compound qui, which share some elemental or compound qui with each other.
It might also be theoretically possible to recognize some of the more common compound qui and extrapolate to some elemental or simpler compound qui through the difference approach. By nothing the variations among behavioural manifestations one might be able to arrive at some relatively constant difference in kind. This difference may then be assumed to be the metabolic manifestation of an elemental or a compound qui.
Personality constructs may offer useful leads. In this approach, traits are taken as behavioural expressions of the metabolism of comound qui, among other things. These compound qui can be regarded as being formed out of various elemental and other compound qui.
An immediate problem arises. Even the description of what constitutes a trait has been the subject of vigorous disagreement. Murdock 535 coded 210 categories of cultural traits among 565 ethnic units. Driver 208 believed that Murdock`s 565 cultures are not functionally integrated wholes. The 210 categories were collapsed by Sawyer and Levine 662 into thirty variables, consisting of dichotomies, three-step, and four-step scales.
Whether there are thousands, hundreds, or fewer cultural traits will continue to be controversial. One of the difficulties is that many scholars are not trying to find some operational unit requirement but a validation of some construct. In Fiske`s thinking 252 , the analysis of personality construct validity “must study a construct-operation unit, not a construct and some casually selected procedure for its measurement”.
The specific procedure must be involved integrally in the total conceptual formulation being subjected to empirical test. Otherwise the investigator will obtain positive support for a given construct when using one measuring procedure but not when using another. “Hence the delineation of the construct must itself identify at least one (and preferable more than one) specific measuring operation congruent with the conceptualization”.
For our purpose of arriving at “units” of elemental and compound qui, at least two factors must be kept in mind. The first is that the difference between two traits which are to serve as indications of our “construct-operation unit” are in fact concerned with the metabolic stuff of qui and not with other influences, such as impellences and catalysts, which will be discussed in later chapters.
Buss and Poley 129, for example, separated traits into three categories of mental abilities, temperament, and motivation. We suspect that impellence plays a more decicive role in their category of motivation than in their category of mental abilities. Differences between two randomly compared traits of these respective categories may be due not necessarily to variation in qui being metabolized but to variations in situational impellences causing selective behaviours to be manifested.
Furthermore, the differences should be sufficiently pinpointed to be related to a relatively small group of elemental or compound qui. The finer the increments, the closer we can get to the “construct-operation unit” of interest. A much higher order of subdivision of traits than even Murdock`s 210 would be required. Perhaps somewhere in the neighborhood of the 18,000 mentioned by Allport and Odber 13 as the number of English words describing traits might comprise a more worthwhile starting baseline.
Since, as Charles W. Morris (1901 - 1979 ) has shown, signs must possess constant and common signification as well as being combinable if they are to serve in the construction of language, the meaning of words is a second possible difference approach. According to one theory, which originated in the work on artificial intelligence by Quillan 607 , a word`s meaning can be represented as nodes in a semantic network. The theory has been subjected to various experimental tests and critiquie 87 and found to fit the laboratory findings 16 .
Under each node, such as “canary”, the first word indicates class membership, such as “bird”. Under “bird” is the indication of ist being an animal, along with bird attributes and so on. Each node is given a fairly rich internal structure. The nodes are interconnected in various ways. The full meaning of a word is a derived collectivity from all the nodes that can be connected to that node representing the to-be-understood word.
A specific node then might be regarded as representing the behavioural manifestation of a particular family of compound qui, which reacts with the families of qui represented in the order nodes to produce the more complex group of compound qui associated with the full meaning of the word. Various elemental and compound qui might therefore be detected as the constant differences between the nodes in a complete semantic network.
Partial tautologies offer some additional leads. In contrast to strict tautologies, partial ones do not say exactly the same thing, even though they both relate to the ostensibly identical subject. It is theoretically possible to grasp generally the core of a phenomenon by resorting to overlapping Fenn diagrams, each circumscribing a partial tautology. Elemental and compound qui are then indicated by the differences between the overlapping areas of successively larger numbers of partial tautologies.
The commonality among different qui-substrate complexes of the same intended virtual presences might indicate elemental or compound qui stimulated by them. The world “hill”, the corresponding photograph, and the map symbol of concentric contour lines share something, which represents one of the metabolic ingredients in the assimilation of one into the other. As mentioned by Searle 678 ,”Words and images do not function in the same way, but they are, in every sense, subtly and profoundly related to each other, sometimes in surprising ways“.
Somewhat allied is the approach based on a commonality among ingredients metabolized when the individual is exposed to different situations but is led to the same endpoint. In elucidating his sense of “religious space”, the architect Breuer 107 spoke about his experiencing the same feeling when walking through a certain physics laboratory as he did when walking through a church: “there is a cylindrical column with a large ball on top, opposite a small column of the same thing; the electrical exchange happens between the two. This is housed in a special little building at M. I. T. , which is rounded and has a spheric dome top. The roof inside is shiny aluminium and the floor is shiny terrazzo. I went in there and I really felt I was in a church. There was not a soul there, it was quiet, clean; it gave me a very funny feeling – a very religious feeling”.
Chronological appearance of behavioural manifestations in the evolution of animals and the psychological development of an individual might also give some clues. Compound qui appearing later might be assumed to result from syntheses, which include earlier elemental and / or compound qui. The successive differences within a line of progress might identify individual stepwise reactants.Shame, for example, appeared later in evolution and personal development than certain other feelings. There is also evidence that musical advances over the centuries followed sequences from the simpler to the more complex 724.
Finally, myths have much to contribute. They represent virtual presences from the elaboration of compound qui over the centuries. The long series of changes has been studied in many ways. Myth was dissected by L�vi-Strauss 456 as follows: “The layered structure…..allows us to look upon myth as a matrix of meanings which are arranged in lines or column, but in which each level always refers to some other level, whichever way the myth is read. Similarly, each matrix of meanings refers to another matrix, each myth to other myths……myths signify the mind that evolves them by making use of the world of which it is itself a part”.
The thematic and structural features of myths might be compared. Differences between similar but not identical myths might then be tied to corresponding elemental and / or compound qui.
Throughout such exercises, we should bear in mind, of course, that elemental and compound qui, just like our other concepts of nuclear particle, atoms, and molecules, are virtual presences. No matter how “elemental” we might imagine a given qui or nuclear particle to be, we can always conjure up more “elemental” entities of which it is composed.
The expanding array of subatomic particles and sub-subatomic particles confirms this state of affairs in scientific experimentation. During the 1920s all matter was held by physicists to be made up of only two elementary particle, the electron and the proton. The negative electron balanced the electrical charge of the positive proton and the heavy mass of the latter accounted for the atomic weight of the atoms. Before long, the explanation needed extending. Each extension stimulated more extensions.
As part of a more complete theory of the electron, the positron was postulated in 1930 as a positively charged electron and observed in 1932. The neutron was discovered in 1933 with neutral charge but a mass almost that of the proton. The meson was suggested in 1934 to mediate the nuclear force and measured in 1947. In the meantime a parade of other nuclear particles appeared in theoretical and experimental publications. By the late 1970s experimentalists had discovered several hundred different kinds of hadrons, which included the long-known proton and the J particle of 1974.
Whereupon physicists began trying to reduce the profusion by describing the hadrons as being built up by even more elementary constituents called quarks. But the quarks promptly led to more relatives, which continued the further begetting of still more cousins in the breeding grounds of high-powered atom smashers – as Imagination`s apprentices enjoyed their fecund ways.
It may well be that the greater usefulness of infinitesimal calculus as compared to difference mathematics over the decades may be traceable in part to the former`s compatibility with our natural way of thinking. By elemental qui, then, we can only mean relatively elemental. There are no absolutes among virtual presences.
Both elemental and compound qui may exist either in the bound form or the free form. The bound form may be either attached to mass-energy, such as virtual presences on a physical substrate, or reacted with each other or with mass-energy to form quimass, the living stuff of organisms.
Free qui is not so commingled, attached, or combined. Since free qui is not bound to or incorporated into any physical substance, they are free from the laws and rules governing physical phenomena. To seek independent instrumental confirmation of free qui in the conventional scientific manner would be tantamount to a pursuit of the paradoxical.
Even words cannot be used to transmit free qui, since to describe it is to affix it to sound or script in which case it is no longer free. Zen masters are very careful not to fall into the trap of words. The following exchange is illustrative 752 .
During a sermon to his disciples, Kwasan of the tenth century advised: “To discipline ourselves in learning is called `hearing`, to reach the point where any learning no more avails is called `approaching`. When one goes beyond these two stages, one is said to have truly transcended”. A monk interrupted and asked what then is meant by truly transcending. Whereupon the master gestured as if beating a drum and said, “Dong, dong, doko-dong, doko-dong”.
When free qui formed by an individual is metabolized by oneself, the person undergoes an act of self-apprehending, as in the seeing of a mental image with the closing of the eyes. When the metabolism involves free qui directly from the Tao itself, the person may be experiencing the mystical.
As summarized by Chamberlain 151 , William James advanced four characteristics of the mystical experience. The first is ineffability. The individual cannot adequately descrice the context of the experience. Mystical truth “exists for the individual who has the transport, but for no one else”. This is confirmed by the second noetic quality, which is “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect”. The third is transiency. The fourth is passivity, although “the oncoming of mystical states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary operations”.
Thus did Jan Ruysbroek and Walter Hinton find union with their God; Francis of Assisi and Isabella Rosa de Santa Maria de Flores with the sun, wolf, bird , and tree in hymns of mystical intimacy 44. “Turn not to the external world!” once counseled Augustine 27. “Into thine own self return. In the inner self alone does truth reside”. The indescribable workings of grace among Christians and of baraka among Muslims 798 come to mind.
This early mystical tradition of Christianity in time gave way to the rationalistic approaches of scholasticism. As people became more educated and rationality progressively more significant in their lives, dogmas and doctrines with reasoned theological supports became necessary to overcome the intellectual doubts that naturally follow from the enthronement of reason over faith. The free qui of personal interiority and solitude was increasingly displaced by the bound qui of words and disputations.
This intellectualizing exercise involving bound qui is no longer religious in the primordial intimacy and intuitive directness. After analyzing the dilemma of the modern believer acculturated in egalitarian mores, Berger 61 proposed a turning away from external authority of religious tradition to the individual experience of personal choice. “If Christianity has a future”, he claimed, “it will be in the resurgence of Christian experience and faith in the lives of people who have never read a theological book”.
Yoga is an exercise toward facilitating the onset of a mystical state, in which the essential stuff of metabolism is free qui. The yogi seeks the supreme enlightenment of blending into the Totality by ridding himself of bodily attachments and ego consciousness as much as possible. The number of intermediaries and distractions between oneself and the object of attention is reduced to a minimum. Since bound qui transmitted via words and things as carriers and qui transformed by one`s own rational processes are no longer the same qui as that produced by the object and directly assimilated by oneself, the yogi attempts to maximize the metabolic ratio of free qui to bound qui. The higher the ratio, the more direct is the communion and the more complete would be the identification between them toward the attainment of samadhi. In this way, the yogi`s Atman becomes united with the Brahman, the supreme reality 135.
In contrast to the more passive transmission of free qui in Yoga, a more active externally initiated process can be seen in the charged atmosphere of mob confrontation. One can just “feel” it. The extremely reactive free qui triggers bursts of social responses, erupting into uncontrollable and explosive violence. It may well be that prophets and messiahs sway the masses in large measure through charismatic free qui flowing directly from themselves without any physical vehicle of transmission.
Telepathy is another theoretical possibility of the direct transmission of free qui. Because of the absence of physical intermediaries, telepathy cannot be tested through physical methods 99. Since the free qui requires an immediacy of precise metabolic compatibility on the part of the communication parties, even subjective demonstrations of telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception would be few and far between, if they do in fact exist.
The evanescence of convincing objective evidence is shown by the followin case report by Reiss 625. Beginning at 9 p.m. on agreed-upon evenings, Reiss sat in his study and turned over cards from a freshly shuffled deck. The twenty-six-year-old subject remained in her own home a quarter of a mile away and noted her guesses on paper. In the first series of seventy-four runs, the lady averaged 18.24 hits out of twenty-five. When she got sick, the experiment was halted and resumed after she recovered. But then, her performance was no different from that of any of the other sixty-seven subjects, who yielded an average of 5.30.
Hypnosis offers a more convincing indication of the participation of free qui than extrasensory perception. While hypnotic instructions to the subject in a trance usually involves externally supplied bound qui, the self-instruction without realization on the part of the post-trance subject to execute the order at the appointed occasion might well involve internally supplied free qui.
The Ericksons 228 recorded the following performance: A stenographer was told while in a trance that in the ensuing week, she was to change pencils during her dictation “on the 320th word, the 550th word and the 725th word. These instructions limited the posthypnotic act to a very small aspect ot the total task. During that time she took dictation from three psychiatrists, each of them noted the phrases at which she changed pencils. Despite the fact that she used many combined word phrases (symbols combining two or more words) it was discovered by count later that she approximated the correct numer closely, never exceeding an error of ten and averaging an error of three words”.
In the case of dreeming, the key inputs may also be internally generated free qui. Not being attached to any physical substrate, the free qui cannot express themselves in any stable relation to other qui that have been fixed to the carriers of our waking familiarity. Relational clues do not usually function in dreams as they do in our conscious actions involving bound qui.
The deficiency of relational cues in dreams was analyzed by Hunter 361 as follows: The person may forget what another individual had said about one`s children`s problems. But the person can remind oneself by going over what one knows or by finding out from others. These kinds of leads are not present in dreams. An individual does not usually “speak realistically about his chldren`s problems in a dream, and may speak of his children`s problems when, in real life, he has none; persons encountered in dreams do not generally have sufficiently well-defined personalities to enable one to conclude anything as to what they would or would not say; there are few if any limits or even faint probabilities as to the sequence in which dreams will occur; dream conversations do not have to make sense or to make nonsense either. And so on I think for any other sort of relational cues one might suggest”.
Art in general seems more steeped in the realm of the free qui of dreams than are the natural sciences. A higher proportion of free qui appears to be active in the activities of the artist than those of the conventional scientist. The higher the proportion of internally produced free qui, the more artistic is the act. If is for this reason that the discovery a revolutionary scientific theory can be likened more to art than to science, although the subsequent elaboration and application belong more obviously to science than to art.
Many art historians do not make explicit distinction between internal free qui and external bound qui as the raw stuff of artistic metabolism. Iconographical analysis attempts to find pre-existing texts, for which images by subsequent artists have been based. The latter are presumably guided by the bound qui from the texts. This attempt to place artistic genesis on a rational and objective basis is to deny the central significance of self-created free qui.
In so doing, as delineated by Harbison 320 , art historians become the conveyors of apparently objective, seemingly scientific information; at a certain time according to a certain source a certain image meant a certain thing”. Establishing connections of this kind has considerable scholarly appeal. “ But do images always operate in such pre-determined ways?” he demurred. “Did not artists employ symbolism in ways which are more original, more creative, yet which can be understood without relying on specific statements in another medium?”
Music provides another outlet for the gushings of free qui otherwise damned up in some individuals. For the black in America during the early 1900s, the singing of the blues also served a cathartic function 180 . At the same time, a sense of human identity was developed 573. In the jazz sessions of small gatherings, so popular during those decades, they found the most intimate occasions for the mutual transformations of their own free qui interacting with free an bound qui from the performer arising from their shared states of oppression and suffering. The listeners responded with a kind of reciprocal metabolic dependence.
There was no one more evocative than Billie Holiday. In the words of Ulanov 786, “she made monodrams of Gershwin, and Rodgers and Hart songs, and the blues, in fact of almost any material that could be translated into a confession of lost innocence…..The atmosphere that surrounded Billie Holiday`s performance was often one of near despair and sometimes, especially in her last years, of anger; but her weary voice, sagging as it sometimes did into uncertain place, never altogether lost its rhythmic or it convincing ambiguity as it lagged behind the beat…….a counterpoint of misery and delight, of hope and hostility…of the conflicts and compulsion of human sexuality”.
Val�ry 792 pictured his own poetic experience in these terms: “All possible objects of the ordinary world, external or internal, beings, events, feelings, and actions, while keeping their usual appearance, are suddenly placed in an indefinable but wonderfully fitting relationship with the modes of our sensibility. That is to say that these well known things and beings — or rather the ideas that represent them —somehow change in value. They attract one another, they are connected in ways different from the ordinary; they become (if you will permit the expression) musicalized, resonant, and, as it were, harmonically related”. There is much in common between such a poetic universe and the dream and musical worlds of free qui.
The concept of free qui might also serve to distinguish intelligence from creativity, which have been shown by behavioural analysis to be essentially dissimilar 146. Intelligence may be said to be a capacity, in part, for the simultaneous assimilation of more than a few compound qui. The greater the number complexed at one stretch toward the resolution of the issue at hand, the more intelligent the individual may be considered to be.
Creativitiy, on the other hand, may be said to represent the assimilation of not only more than a few qui reactants at the same time, but also internally produced bound and free qui, which are not available from the external environment. The greater the proportion and meaningfulness of these personal qui in an elegant attainment of a socially significant objective, the more creative the individual may be said to be.
One of the important operations in creativity is imagining, as contrasted to perceiving. In the case of perceiving, the essential metabolic input is primarily externally provided, whereas in imagining the essential metabolic ingredients also include internally generated free qui to a considerable extent. It is because of the latter condition that, as demonstrated by Casey 143 , “imagination is an autonomous act; independent in status and free in its action”.
Creativity, of course, goes beyond sheer imagining. In creativity a personal signature is impressed, which is unique, fine, and culturally useful. Fiedler 248 defined the term signature as “the sum of individuating factors in a work, the sign of the Persona or Personality, through which an Archetype is rendered, and which itself tends to become a subject as well as a means of the poem. Literature, properly speaking, can be said to come into existence at the moment a Signature is imposed upon the Archetype. The purely archetypal, without a signature element, is the Myth”.
He detected the similar archetypal material of immersion and resurrection in the story of Balder the Beautiful and Shakespeare`s Tempest. We identify Shakespeare`s Tempest “only in all is specificity : the diction, meter, patterns of imagery….the sparcely motivated speech on premarital chastity, the breaking of the fictional frame by the unconventional religious plaudits ….” Without these personalizing elements, the result would not be Tempest. It would simply be a retelling of the myth of Balder the Beautiful, an output of knowledge rather than that of creativity.
In Engell`s description 223, the creative imagination is “a faculty that even more than reason, is seen to reveal the place and truth of man`s experience and to unlock that mysterious flux and counterpart of the cosmos, as vast and as wonderful, the human psyche”.
The range of qui metabolism then dictates the human fullness of one`s living, while the extension of this range reflects one`s growth and creativity. Social ethics should be based, therefore, not only on an equitable distribution of mass-energy as material goods, but also qui—not only qui quantitatively so to speak, but also qui of a reasonable assortment and richness. At bottom, the right to qui is much of what human rights are all about.
Although the law has been ambivalent and blind in some of the related aspects of the social traffic of qui, it has been explicit in others. The protection of the free speech and the freedom of worship are prime examples of specific awareness. It extends to the right of trade work and assurance against libel. Practically all of the state jurisdictions in America have enacted statutes against the invasion of privacy 222. The right to privacy now includes the right to publicity, which prohibits the legal use of a celebrity`s name or photograph without consent 311. Most judges also exercise considerable care in granting authorization to law enforcement officials to install electronic surveillance devices 716 .
When transactions involving qui associated with virtual presences are drastically curtailed, the person is largely dehumanized. Since the higher qui is not permitted to exert ist influence, the person lives predominantly in a truncated human mode – a hairless ape in much of life.
When transactions involving animal qui are also severely curtailed, the person is largely deanimated. To the degree that an individual is employed as a processor mass-energy; as a mechanism of levers, pulleys, and inclined planes; and as a computer of programmed instructions – to that degree can one be managed with mechanical reliability. To the degree that the individual is managed with mechanical reliability – the laborer on the production line, the clerk in the accounting department, and the sycophant in the front office – to that degree is one replaceable by a device. The individual then exists primarily in the inanimate mode, a zombie for all intents and purposes.
When an individual sees oneself as obviously of no impact on anyone, the person feels like the lotus in the allegorical poem by Li Po 462 of the eighth century:
In the deep sequestered stream the lotus grows,
Blooming fresh and fair in the morning sun.
Ist glowing petals hide the clear autumn water,
And ist thick leaves spread like blue smoke.
Alas! in vain is beauty excels the world.
Who knows? Who will speak of its rare perfume?
Lo, the frost will come, chilling the air,
And ist crimson must wither, its fragrance fade.
Ill has it chosen the place to plant its root.
Would it could move to the margin of a flower pond!
Only if an individual`s influence spreads to other human beings through virtual presences is one living as a human being in the complete societal sense. The wider the effect and / or the deeper and more lasting it is, the more thoroughly human is his life. That of a labor leader is more so than that of a swimming coach of a small college, a militant figure more so than a recluse, a cardinal more so than a small-town sheriff. Striving after power therefore is intensely human. “ Satan seduced the pope with power”, wrote Rosanow 639. On this side of the Atlantic, Dickey 205 spoke about:
…the president
who is weeping in the Oval Office
at the thought of having to give up
the least hangnail of power.
So far, we have evaded the question: If qui is other than mass-energy,just what is it? We have done so because we do not know the answer, even assuming for the moment that we do know the nature of mass-energy. But Human the Seeker would not let us weasel out of the situation without at least a provisional statement —no matter how metaphysical, nor matter how speculative, no matter even how wrong the offered virtual presence might eventually turn out to be. We shall oblige —by way of musing.
Qui seems often more at home in the domain of Silence. The importance of Silence has long been stressed by the Shivaic philosophers in the transmission of the power of the inexplicable shakti from guru to disciple 629 . Silence is not necessarily a vacuum of qui, nor a zone of non-transference or inactivity. It is merely the absence of audibly-conveyed qui or mass-energy. Those qui, or mass-energy for that matter, conveyable by sight, smell, feel, and as yet unrecognized physical and nonphysical vehicles may well be interacting and otherwise saturating the silent realm.
To Wittgenstein 848, silence is the transcendence of speech: “What we cannot speak about we must pass in silence”. Although he draws a line, as positivists do, between what we can speak about and what we should be silent about, he is not one of them. As spelled out by Englemann 224, “The difference is that they have nothing to be silent about. Positivism holds – and this is its essence – that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about”.
Tung 775 stressed that this positive Silence “has always been the underlying concern of Eastern philosophy. Indeed one might go so far as to say that that is what all Eastern philosophies are all about. For the focus of truth in Eastern thought does not reside in the speech or saying of the philosopher, but primarily in the way he lives his silence”. There is a what, a why, and a how to which one is silent about.
In music, Clifton 167 described the functionally active non-nothingness of Silence as “an experienced musical quality which can be pulsed in musical time, attached or detached to the edge of a musically spatial body, and finally, which can often be experienced as being in motion in different dimensions of the musical spacetime manifold”. Brelet 105 discussed the ways in which silence interacts with musical tensions. On the one hand, “the experiences of anticipation and surprise are at least linked up with the experience of tension as being either maintained at a continuous level or increased. On the other hand, silence also functions effectively as a means of drawing off, or grounding, the amount of felt tension, as in the conclusion of the Lyric Suite and Mahler`s Ninth Symphony”.
Blyth 83 called our attention to the Japanese poet Basho`s sensitivity to Silence penetrating the sound as the sound penetrates the rock in his haiku:
The Silence !
The voice of the cicada
Penetrates the rocks.
We are continually aware of the iridescence of Silence. There is the quiet of the falling snow and the quiet of the gathering storm. There is the stillness of the wondering and waiting, and the stillness of the dreading and despairing. There is the pause at birth and the pause at death.
We keep probing in this “Silent Zero”, as in Lu`s couplet 477:
Trying the Empty Nothing, and demanding Something;
Banging the Silent Zero, in search of sound.
Can it be that qui is the effusion of Silence called “Time?” that the basic form of this Time is Qui 0 or time – Newton`s time that flows with even tenor, the invariant time of physics, the mathematical time of the inanimate? That the living organism, immersed in Time, siphons off part of qui 0 and metabolizes it into other forms of qui 1, qui 2 ,….qui n, as in the refashioning of Time into a song 112? That the remaining unmodified time or qui 0 continues to exist as the undifferentiated time of the inanimate world?
The organism would also be suject to its inanimate mode to this unmodified time of existence and through it would maintain synchronous order with the rest of the universe. But that portion of Time which is metabolized as the stuff of livingness would become differentiated from the rest of Time through increasing heterogeneity in the successive transformations of qui. The greater the number of ways in which qui is metabolized, the richer would be the variety of forms in which the ensuing differentiations can occur.
In this connection, the Russian poet Aleksandr Aleksdandrovich Blok (1880-1921) envisioned “music” to be the “essence of the world”. In the preface to his essay, The Downfall of Humanism, he wrote: “There are ….two times, two dimensions; one historical, chronological, the other immeasurable and musical”.
Should we wish to fancy further possibilities for the enrichment of variety of qui expressions, we may envision each form of qui as capable of existing in a number of “excited states” and as exhibiting dissimilar properties in its various states. This is analogous to each of the mass-energy quarks exhibiting dissimilar properties in its various excited states, as postulated in physics. The transitions from the ground or one excited state to the next might well provide some of the essential sparks of life.
Qui 1…..n would be regarded as being raised to a higher level of vitality when there is a net “addition” of qui 0 in the living process. It would be regarded as dropping to a lower level of vitality when there is a net “liberation”. The qui output of an organism that is not assimilated by another organism or itself would eventually “drop back” to the basic form, qui 0, and return to the cosmic pool of inanimate time. So would the qui of the quimass upon death. Metabolic effort is required to sustain qui above the basic form of qui 0. Without unceasing metabolic effort, life itself winds down until the inevitable dust-to-dust cycle, qui 0-mass to qui 0-mass, takes over.
Human behaviour would be time-invariant then only in the inanimate mode. It would not be so in the animal and human modes, for part of the time or qui 0 would be transformed into qui 1…..n. The noninvariance would be complicated further in the human mode, since the human being can metabolize qui into virtual time itself, which exerts real effects in certain facets of real time.
While we would not, on this line of speculation, expect the conservation of time hold in the animal and human modes, might we not expect the conservation if Time to hold? Perhaps, the sum of Time in the universe is a constant but not that of time?
Should we further imagine that a proto-component of quimass might be related to the photon of light with frequency but no mass711 ? We note the close association between life and light throughout human observation and thought over the ages. To the Igbos, Chukwu the Creator also manifests himself as Lieght 569; among the 112 ways to true consciousness chanted by the Hindu god Shivato to his consort Devi, as recorded in the 4.000 year-old tantras439,are the following:
“Consider your essence as light rays from center to center up the vertebrate, and so rises livingness in you…Shakti, see all space as if already absorbed in your own head in brilliance….Waking, sleeping, dreaming, know you as light”. The modern poet Aleixandre 10 spoke longingly in his early poems of the days when we all had been part of the moon, the sea, and the rest of the universe as a pure element like “a chip of light that burns itself up with love making”.
According to this line of speculation, light might serve not only as the metronome of the worl through its constant and maximum velocity governing the physical moieties, but also as the limiting factor governing the metabolic raw stuff of life and behaviour. Might there not be a theoretical limit on the “amount” of sustainable life on earth at any given moment, therefore, not only because of the physical mass-energy parameters but also of the qui 0…n present and being added to by the influx of light from beyond?
If the photon is in some way a proto-component of quimass, might we not expect a substantive as well as a hypothetical linkage between time or qui 0 and mass-energy? What might we then say to the conjecture that Time is the Void in which mass-energy exists and together comprise the sensed reality of the physical world? And that space then is no longer to be thought of as the medium for mass-energy but only as a property of it?
It is with considerable hesitation that we tiptoe into the fringes of the complicated suject to time. Ancient myths had incorporated time into the very personages of the gods themselves 176. Most present-day thinkers, like Reichenbach 621, have been concerned with the objective flow of time as manifested in the inanimate world. Some authors, like Gr�nbaum 395, have attempted to impart a mind- dependence to this temporal passage. Still others, like Mellor 503, have begun with the premise of a metaphysical unreality, or like Brodsky 113, have occupied themselves with “what time can do to a man”, or like Husserl 363, have disregarded the cosmic time and focused more on a Time of inner consciousness.
Can it be that all of them have caught complementary glimpses of Time in its manifold refractions? And that man in his omnifaceted fusion of qui 0…..n in his inanimate, animal, and human modes, has become Nature`s prime prism of Time in its objective flow, animation of life, and flux of spirit? Perhaps our musings might conclude with the summary statement: The uniqueness of life is the metabolism of time 711 .
But musing or no, we cannot help but respect the insight of Lao Tzu 443 of the sixth century BC, as he dwelt on the mysterious interactions among what we might now be identifying as various forms of qui: “That which looked at cannot be seen is called invisible. That which listened to cannot be heard is called inaudible. That which touched cannot be felt is called intangible. Since these three cannot be separately depicted, we let them interact and create the One”.
