The Inner Frontier

Star Trek always started with a little introduction about the “final frontier”. Of course space is not the final frontier at all, and it never will be. The final frontier will always be the human soul and the human experience. This can never change because all the knowledge we can obtain will, by its very nature, add to the depth and distance of our inner world. As our inner world deepens the “frontier” of our human experience will extend, infinitely.

This allows an endless number of worlds of discovery even after we have completed our Grand Unified Theory and completely recorded all knowledge of our genetic heritage.

There is no end to the discoveries inside you. Some of these discoveries will be common to all people, that’s what keeps us together as human beings, our shared experience. This is why fiction works when we read it, we can go along with the hero in the story because we can imagine being him, doing what he does, following in his steps so to say. Movies, plays, books, songs, poetry and tall tales all work this way. By the same token there will be experiences which only you can really understand, discoveries that only you can really claim. The nature of our study of Qigong is very much about the secret, unique world of discoveries like this. They will not, at first, necessarily make us money or make us famous. But they will bring us much closer to what we really are, to our individual “fate”. The problem with so many people when they ask about the “meaning of life” is that they think it is like a mathematical equation, objectively the same for everyone. But we don’t share the “meaning of life” at all, not in the way this means. The only thing common to all of us about the meaning of life is that we each of us have one. Other than that the meanings will be more diverse than all our different faces, each recognizable as being absolutely unique.

We each of us have the ability to recognize thousands of faces and tell them apart from one another and to remember them. But we have been conditioned to think that we should not realize and recognize how different each person’s life is. How completely different is it from every other life. It’s not like medicine where we are betting on the statistical probability that whichever drug cured a “significant percentage” of patients will also work for us. It’s not like taking out an insurance policy and hoping that the statistics are on our side or investing in a mutual fund and believing that the “numbers” will protect your future. That’s all fine for these socially constructed forms of security but it can never do for exploring that unique and completely individual darkness which is the inner world of our being.

We owe ourselves this inward journey. Surprisingly it is not all about our emotions, fears, past traumas and hopes. All that is important but this layer is only about the EMOTIONAL self, the PSYCHOLOGICAL self. This inner world is even more basic than that. It is the world of self, pure unadulterated self. And therefore it is firmly rooted in the body. We need to feel our own bodies not as instruments like weight lifting machines, or professional dancers or anything that trained into habit.

When we stand there at the beginning of the Qigong, or sitting as in the Blossoms in the Spring, we first try to calm ourselves starting with the outside world. As you do this pay attention to the layers falling away. Layers of discomfort, then of impatience, then of emotion. Within a small amount of time you are feeling things happen inside your body for which you have no name, like an unknown smell neither pleasant no unpleasant but definitely unknown.

Let your breathing calm and blend with the feelings in this inner world. You have begun your exploration.