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    Tai Chi Mind
    Tai Chi Mind
    Tai Chi Mind
    Ebook98 pages1 hour

    Tai Chi Mind

    By Ph.D. William H. Koar III

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Life Span Development is an area of psychological research. It looks at an individual’s journey from birth to death and the challenges along the way. I can’t think of a more important topic. Consequently, this book will discuss Life Span Development from multiple perspectives. It will look at it from the perspective of my martial art

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPalmetto Publishing Group
    Release dateNov 11, 2019
    ISBN9781641116404
    Tai Chi Mind
    Author

    Ph.D. William H. Koar III

    A long time Tai Chi practitioner and psychologist.

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      Book preview

      Tai Chi Mind - Ph.D. William H. Koar III

      INTRODUCTION

      Why search for the truth? Hopefully, if found, it would help navigate a seemingly complex and at times painful existence. It is not always painful, but there are moments and for some those moments last longer than for others. When things are difficult it would be nice to have someone to ask, what’s up, what should I do, how does one make sense of this? On the other hand some say you should figure it out for yourself. There are always two sides to a coin. Whether we ask someone or try to figure it out, one thing is sure, life is short. Since we are alive we might as well make the most of it. If truth can keep us moving in the right direction, then it seems a worthwhile pursuit. For me the right direction is trying to make the most of my short time on earth, of which I have already wasted much. Interestingly, depression, one of the many pitfalls on the path, has been described as being stuck in time or not moving.

      The purpose of this second book with my Tai Chi teacher Daniel Yu Wang is to take the practice of Tai Chi Chuan, especially its underlying philosophy and training principle and apply them to an area of psychological inquiry. Why psychological? Well I was trained as a psychologist so it is an area I am familiar with. I could have chosen any area. As I said in my earlier book one of the reasons Daniel was so attracted to Tai Chi is it is based on a philosophical system, the theory of yin and yang. I wanted to see if Tai Chi and this system could help me understand things other than fighting. Could it help me understand psychology? Could it help me understand life? Could it take me from the particular to general. There are only so many things one can remember. In other words, could it help me find some truth. Because fighting along with eating, having sex and maybe praying are among man’s oldest activities, it might be a good place to look. If Tai Chi explains more than just combat, it is like finding a key I can use, you can use to unlock many doors.

      Tai Chi Chuan means grand ultimate fist. Sometimes people shorten the name and just say Tai Chi. Some people practice Tai Chi for health reasons, others practice Tai Chi to learn how to fight. Chuan means fist. I practice for both reasons. Daniel Yu Wang has been my teacher for many years. He is not only a martial arts’ master but survived the Cultural Revolution in China. Many people were not so fortunate. Depending on the source it is estimated between thirty to forty million people perished during this period of time making the Cultural Revolution one of the greatest tragedies to date in human history. Daniel has seen and experienced much suffering. He has been a witness to man’s ignorance as the Buddha might say or man’s evil as a Christian might explain. This makes his way of looking at the world unique and important. Because he has seen error on a grand scale he might be able to help me, help you, avoid more tragedies.

      Daniel likes to call these tragedies, like the Holocaust, like the Cultural Revolution, like the killing fields of Cambodia or the Rwandan genocide, man made disasters. It seems reasonable to say, if we made these disasters, we should be able to avoid them. We can only avoid them, however, if we have the right information. Making matters all the more urgent, these disasters seem to be occurring with growing regularity and intensity with each succeeding generation. I believe Daniel has the wisdom to help us jump out of this loop of self created suffering. It is something he wants to help us do before he dies and I decided to try and help him if I can. Making matters all the more urgent is the specter of climate change or maybe it will be something else. Daniel feels we are on the road to calamity and sometimes I feel that way too.

      So where are we? Imagine you have cancer and are dying. Then someone finds a cure. He or she finds the truth about the disease. You go from feeling terrible to feeling good. You go from dying to living. The power of truth is awesome. Now pretend you live in California like I do and you are looking at a piece of dirt. Imagine you have X-ray eyes and can see that underneath this rather ordinary looking piece of land there is a big gold nugget. In this case the big gold nugget is Tai Chi Chuan. Finally, imagine we have a great martial arts master to ask questions of and to receive answers from, which we do. We have a guide who knows the way. Or we just happen to be very, very lucky that day.

      PSYCHOLOGY

      The psychological area we are going explore is called life span development. How does an individual go from birth to death? What are the challenges along the way? What is the best way to respond to these challenges? These proposed stages may underly some of our very basic assumptions about life. They may underlie what we think is right and wrong, without our even being aware of it. I chose Erik Erikson who was an early contributor to the field. Now Sigmund Freud had a number of disciples, for lack of a better word. All of them were psychiatrists to the best of my knowledge. Erikson was the exception, he was an artist. More recently, other scholars have looked at this same topic and come up with different conclusions. Their conclusions are backed by research. So Erikson’s contributions are not the final word on life span development. He was, however, a smart guy with many keen insights. It is his ideas that I am most interested in, not so much the technical aspects of the field.

      Nowadays life span development is more of a science than a field for theorizing as it was in the early days of Erikson. In science, as in all things, you need a place to to start. You need a guess, an explanation or hypothesis you can test. Then with the test results you can corroborate your hypothesis or start changing your assumptions to fit the results of your data and test again to see if the changes are correct. Thus begins what is often a long journey to a more realistic or truthful interpretation of what one thinks and is actually occurring. The truth can be very hard to find. Difficult, especially in social science because it tends to change. It changes because each generation will be a little bit or a whole lot different. Their cultural experiences will be different. Maybe they lived during a time of war and revolution like Daniel or maybe they lived during a time of peace. Maybe they lived in a rich county, maybe they lived in a poor country. This in turn will have an effect on what they think is important and what actions they will tend to take. So to summarize, scientific testing will change the the hypothesis and hopefully make it more accurate as new information accumulates and as that information is gathered in new zeitgeists. I believe the times in which we live can change facts or at least the way we label them. This is one of the reasons why it is hard for social science and science in general to be definitive. Finally, and many people forget this, the only thing that is absolutely certain in science is skepticism, which is another way of saying we need to keep an open mind. In the psychological sciences the truth is confirmed by statistics, but statistics always leaves the door open for the exception. In the philosophy of Tai Chi Chuan, the only thing that is thought to be certain is change.

      MENTAL HEALTH

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