Qi
In the past few weeks, I have been preparing the Midwinter Lecture. In the process, I reread Ken Rose’s wonderful book, “A Brief History of Qi”. Impressive, profound and yet so clear, how he follows the development of the Chinese character Qi over 3500 years. I became very aware again of how the original meaning of words, especially from another culture and time, can be lost in a translation. How a word can be transformed from one cultural framework into another and lose its essence in the process. Without intention of the translator, who often does not realise that he is reading and understanding the other language through his own cultural glasses.
Qi has often become a container concept in the West. Often translated as life energy, mystical energy, it can often be used to explain the mundane. But the character Qi can actually not be translated, but can be experienced.
Qi is Qi. The character has a material aspect and it has an immaterial aspect to it. It is matter and non-matter at the same time. And in the 3,500 years that Ken Rose describes, there are three constants that keep emerging as characteristic properties of Qi: Connection, Movement, Information Transfer.
The first chapter of the Yi Jing (the Book of Change) states that 1 manifests in 3. In our reality we can only perceive that which is present in duality. We know night because we know day. We know what is high because we know what is low. We experience heat because we know cold. Thus we know 1 because we know 2. And when 1 and 2 are there, there is of course the interaction between them, the exchange of information between 1 and 2. The connection, the movement and the exchange of information between 1 and 2. And that is 3.
3 is Qi. And since in our dual reality there is connection everywhere, everything and about is Qi. Both on a macro level and on a micro level. Qi is the connection between opposites, but in the opposition it is the opposition and thus forms the object of the relationship itself. Qi is a network of information. An increasingly dense weave of information connections, which at a certain point becomes so dense that we perceive it as matter.
Qi is everything and everywhere and everything and everywhere is Qi. Information in its dynamic and connecting property is everything and everywhere and everything and everywhere is Information in its dynamic and connecting property. Here it is where modern science, ancient philosophy, religion form a network of our new reality and future.
