I have lost my Qi! Can you help me find my Qi?
I have lost my Qi! Can you help me find my Qi?
Can you please help me look for my Qi (Chi)? I may have lost it at the beach or the gym. If you find it, could you send it to me as an e-mail attachment?
Actually, I am tricking you. Qi is impossible to find as you cannot see, hear, smell, or feel it. In fact, no one has ever been able to measure the existence of Qi. It is truly more elusive than a Leprechaun or a four-leaf clover. However, just because we cannot measure something doesn’t necessarily mean that it does not exist. After all, black holes probably exist as might anti-matter and no one has measured or seen either of these. So Qi may be like that.
You see Qi flows through my body in rivers called meridians. My body has 11, 12, or 13 meridians depending upon which school of thought you follow. There were originally 12 meridians because that is how many rivers there are in China. You see in the ancient times, roughly 5,000 years ago, it was considered a sacrilege to open the human body as we now commonly do in anatomy classes and in autopsies. So it makes perfect sense that there would be as many meridians as there are rivers in the world (it was thought that China was the whole world at this time [in China]). That is because the ancient teachings stated that the human body was arranged like the world (China). As water flows through the rivers and provides life to the lands, Qi flows through my meridians and provides life to all my tissues (please do not confuse this with my blood and arteries). When I die you are welcome to search for the meridians in my body. However, be aware that meridians have never been seen in the human body even though there have been millions of anatomy classes and autopsies in America alone. Are humans the only mammals that have meridians and Qi? That seems unfair to animals, and highly unlikely as we are just another type of mammal, and yet no one has ever been able to see or measure meridians or Qi in any animal.
You probably cannot measure or see my Qi because it is a very weak and mysterious force. We humans simply cannot measure something as weak a force as Qi. Hmmmm, it seems odd that something so powerful would be so weak that we cannot measure it. Moreover, how can something so weak have such a strong effect? Ahhhh, but I am digressing. Let’s leave that question for another time and ask one that is more germaine to my Qi. What energy forces can we measure? Well, we can measure galvanic skin response (GSR) which is common in lie detector tests and is a measurement of the resistance of the skin which changes when the ion concentrations in your skin (dermis) change. We can also measure the electrical currents produced by the firing of groups of neurons in your brain which are know to produce different wave forms depending on your level of cortical excitability. This test is called an EEG or electroencephalogram. Well perhaps Qi is weaker than GSR, EEG, EMG (electromyogram), or EKG (electrocardiogram).
So what is the smallest form of energy we CAN measure? Well I am not sure, but I know that I can measure a single photon of light in my laboratory. That is a very small amount of energy! We can also measure the amount of energy that is absorbed by DNA when excited by a UV light source with a spectrophotometer. Well how about something smaller than DNA. The smallest form of energy that exists would have to be smaller than a photon or even an atom. I think that an electron would have to be the smallest amount of energy we know of. If we could only get a single atom to give up a single electron from its outer-most shell to another atom, perhaps we could measure THIS change in energy. This in fact is done all the time and this new atom is referred to as a radio-isotope. You can then measure the amount of energy gained by the atom by using autoradiography (that is to say that you expose film with the radioactive signal), or by a scintillation counter, or even a simple Geiger counter. Perhaps soon we will have measurements of the amount of energy consumed by anti-matter as the world’s largest Super-Collider begins measuring the collision of atomic particles. This will truly be the smallest measurement of energy ever measured by man. However, until we have this data the electron is the smallest form of measurable energy on the earth. Is the amount of energy in Qi smaller than the smallest form of energy known to be on the earth, the electron? Most likely it is not.
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The philosophical precept of Ockham’s Razor comes to mind here. This is the idea that; if all explanations of an argument are equal, the most simple explanation tends to be the truth. So, do you think that Meridians cannot be found, and that Qi is a life force that is very powerful and yet too weak to be measured, because???: A) they are too mysterious, magical, or infinitesimally small to be seen or measured in any way, or B) they don’t exist.
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