Qigong in Shanghai

I'm on the way home from a consciousness conference in Shanghai — CSTS (Consciousness, Science, Technology and Society) conference.   One of the more intriguing aspects of the conference, for me, was the significant number of Chinese researchers and practitioners there who were involved with parapsychology, qigong and other related areas…

I’ve been reading for a while about a multi-decade project in Kunming dealing with macro-PK (psychokinesis), remote viewing and other capabilities among schoolchildren.  I had emailed with one of the researchers involved with the project before, but hadn’t dug that deep.   At CSTS I met a number of young Chinese researchers who were involved with gathering and analyzing data from the psychic children of Kunming; they showed me some videos of their work.   These “kids” were quite matter-of-fact about their work — they had observed various children’s anomalous abilities many times, and viewed their role as documenting and studying the phenomena rather than trying to prove their reality (as they assumed the proof to have been completed well before their entry into the project).  I’m planning to coordinate with these guys to visit Kunming sometime in the next year to check out these phenomena personally and see if I can help with experimental design, data analysis or theoretical analysis or whatever…

On the other hand, one of the parapsychology-oriented presenters at the conference somewhat rubbed me the wrong way.   He had a lot of exciting-sounding talk (in Chinese, translated for those of us in the audience who needed it) about channeling the mind of the universe, and so forth.  He then offered a demonstration of his system for teaching people to channel the mind of the universe… and brought up some of his young female students to the front of the room.  One of them proceeded to recite a short poem in an ancient Chinese style.  He then noted the complexity and difficulty of writing a poem in this archaic formal style, and said that no modern youth could do that on their own — it could only be done by channeling the minds of the ancients, via the mind of the universe.   Later on, this same teacher demonstrated qigong healing on an elderly man with serious stiffness in the fingers, due to a previously medically diagnosed problem.  There was much talk about the cosmic wisdom of the universe and such, but the elderly man professed that at the end of the process, he felt a bit better but his fingers were still stiff.

I did have the distinct sensation of seeing some sort of energy jumping up and down out of the elderly man’s body, at one point.  On the other hand, it’s possible I was just sleepy and drifting off into some sort of dream.

I’m not going to assert that this teacher was lacking in special abilities or engaging in fraudulent activities, or anything like that.   But for sure, his demonstrations sent my Skeptic Sense way tingly.  According to the Chinese I asked, the student’s poem was competent but not especially exceptional.  The amount of glowing evangelism about the channeling of the mind of the universe seemed far out of proportion to the magnitude of the phenomena displayed….   It didn’t escape me that the teacher was running a commercial school and seeking tuition-paying students…

The next day the Kunming-project guys took me and Ruiting and another Hong Konger, L, to the Qigong Museum, a half-hour taxi ride across Shanghai.   The historical displays there were fascinating, and the ancient illustrative artworks were ornate, complex and beautiful.

Some random photos I took at the museum are here:

https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipMn2U9kiEkIVnCLZLI3Z2cGHCIFOuoAr8FKnGyx

(My pictures come nowhere remotely near doing  the museum justice; I didn't photo the stunning ancient drawing and such, but merely a few of the tech-y displays and machines.)

There were also some intriguing electronic devices on display — electrical Qigong machines from the 1990s.  These had a bunch of dials and knobs on them and seem to have been used to generate electromagnetic fields configured to affect the body in certain ways.  The tour guide was quite negative about these devices, opining that qigong would always work better when manifested by a biological human being.

And there were some photos of experiments done capturing qigong energy in various glass-bulb-type containers.   I asked the tour guide what results had been obtained from this work, and he said there had been 10,000 papers published on this and he wasn’t qualified to summarize them, but there had been a lot of positive results.

Ah, and some photos and information about the history of qigong-based anesthesia in Chinese operating rooms.   It appears to have worked as well as chemical anesthetics, with fewer side-effects.   Note that we don’t yet understand, within Western medicine, how chemical anesthetics work; the anesthetics in current medical use were figured out via trial and error.

After our tour through the museum, a Qigong master — who had been at the consciousness conference, but had opted not to give a presentation to the crowd — offered to give us a practical demonstration.

He asked L to stand still and relax and close his eyes.   He then projected energy at L through his hand — and we watched, bemused and impressed, as he pulled L’s body back and forth, from a distance of about 12 inches.   L (someone I know fairly well) tends to be skeptical of qigong, psi and other such things, and clearly was not complicit in the demonstration.  When the demonstration was done and L opened his eyes, L was quite surprised when we told him his body had been swaying back and forth in coordination with the qigong master’s hand.

The master then tried to do the same trick with me, but it didn’t work.  I was standing there in a state of fairly deep relaxation, doing yoga/meditation breathing and so forth.   When it was done, the master said it had failed due to a blockage of qi in my right knee, which he said had an old injury in it, from at least 5 years before.  I don't know if this was actually the reason -- I'm a difficult case for hypnosis too.   However, it's true that my right knee is mildly shaky due to a skiing accident I had 16 years ago.   He then offered to try to cure my knee — and indeed, when he laid his hands on my knee in his special qigong way, the knee started feeling extremely hot and felt like it was vibrating deep inside at a high rate (a quite different feeling from what happens if the knee is physically shaken back and forth or if someone rapidly vibrates their hands on the skin).

Afterwards, outside the museum, the master looked carefully at L’s body and correctly diagnosed a couple minor medical issues of L’s.   He looked at me and noted a problem with my lower back, which so far as I know does not exist (my lower back feels fine and has never given me any problems so far); I did have an upset stomach from my dinner the previous night, though, which he did not note.  I asked him to take a look at a woman who was there with me, and whom I knew to be in the 7th week of pregnancy — not far along enough to be showing at all.  He looked at her and after a bit of scrutiny said “The baby is healthy, and your health seems good, congratulations.”

Of course, none of this was skeptic-proof, but it was nonetheless pretty impressive and compelling.   The impression I got of his qigong sensing and diagnostic process, was that it was a mix of things: careful observation and inference and medical experience, plus some sort of bioelectromagnetic field wizardry (involving both perception and manipulation of bioelectromagnetic fields, in ways that Western science does not yet encompass), plus probably some sort of psi component as well.

Teasing apart these various aspects of his abilities is interesting to me, because I have a Western science oriented perspective.  It’s interesting to me to figure out what aspects of what he does are due to psi, what aspects are due to weird bioelectromagnetic field dynamics, and what aspects are just due to him being a keen observer and a charismatic guy and a good doctor.

On the other hand, from his point of view, it doesn’t really matter much which aspects of his practice fall into which of my Western analytical categories.   Chinese philosophy and Chinese medical practice are holistic by nature, and what matters is the state of consciousness he achieves, and the medical cures he facilitates, rather than the explanation of what he does in terms of a particular combination of phenomena belonging to carefully-formalized reductive analytical categories.