by Shawn Kirby L.Ac.

My colleague Eric Brand went down to Taos, New Mexico, recently to visit with his friends at Redwing Books, Bob Felt and Martha Fielding. While he was there he inherited a little piece of acupuncture history that he brought home as a gift for me (knowing of my abiding interest in Japanese acupuncture) – a piece of moxa from a 30 year old box of Japanese moxa that once belonged to Yoshio Manaka MD. This wonderful present will never be used – I will keep it as a treasure on my desk to remind me of Manaka Sensei, a wonderful practitioner and innovator, whose greatest contribution, in my opinion, was his ability to utilize critical thinking in terms of our medicine.

Manaka Sensei was one of the most lucid and important minds in our field to have put pen to paper in the last five hundred years. His book, Chasing the Dragon’s Tail (co-written, edited and made possible through the excellent work of Stephen Birch) ranges far and wide over numerous topics. The most important topic discussed, in my opinion, being Manaka’s “X Signal System” theory.

The X Signal System was Manaka’s way of reframing and reexamining the concept of “Qi.” Most western students fall into the trap of looking at Qi as “energy,” utilizing a frame of reference informed by the western dialectic of matter/energy. Qi is seen as the “élan vital” or energy which animates lifeless matter. This viewpoint is often blamed on Descartes, but in fact we see precursors of this worldview in the book of Genesis, where Jehovah breathes life (energy) into his clay figure he has fashioned bringing it, Adam, to life.  (In much the same way as the legendary Rabbi Loeb created the Golem to save the Jewish Quarter in Prague in from an angry anti-Semitic mob. The rabbi purportedly created a creature made of mud, and then breathed life into it through use of Kabbalistic magic, reading a series of sacred words.  The golem rose to "life" and defended the Jewish quarter from attack.) Bear in mind, the ancients didn’t grow up watching Sesame Street or the Electric Company – they didn’t conceptualize air or “breath” as matter made of molecules. They saw it as a mysterious force (energy) that could make its presence known but could not be grasped like a material object. The matter/energy dialectic is so old it’s seems as if it has almost imprinted itself onto the western genome.

On the other side of the coin, it has also become fashionable for many in our profession to adopt an “Orientalist” viewpoint, and suggest that the primitive/animistic/magical worldview that informed ancient East Asian metaphysics with concepts such as Qi, Yin and Yang, are “better” because they skirt many of the contradictions produced by a dualistic philosophy like Descartes’. The problem with this approach is that, while the simplistic metaphysics that inform our medicine does skirt some problems, that’s a bit like saying that an inflatable raft is more advanced than an ocean liner because it’s more energy efficient. This is not to say that these ancient naturalistic philosophies are not filled with important intuitions about reality – but we must continue to use critical thinking and examine these viewpoints carefully so as to bring them with us into the new millennium in a usable form. Acupuncture has always been about helping people, not about maintaining a traditional “faith-based belief system.” It is our duty to our acupuncture ancestors not to blindly follow them, but to utilize our hearts and minds to continue their work of benefiting people’s health.

To this end, Manaka Sensei took a different tack in examining what “Qi” might mean, and how we can think about this using more modern and intellectually sound thought processes. What he discovered was that the paradigm of information systems theory could be used much more effectively, and realistically, to describe the phenomenon we know as "Qi."

Stephen Birch describes it this way in the introduction to Chasing the Dragon’s Tail –

“The term ‘qi’ is used in the traditional literature in a manner that is in many respects identical to the use of the term ‘information.’ In the traditional literatures, the term qi is used to refer to both the body in its physiological stuff, and in its processes and derived properties; that is, in a quantitative-qualitative manner, and to identify tiny non-quantitative signals or relational properties that produce effects; that is, in a purely qualitative manner. In scientific literature, the term information is used to refer to the same properties. It can name the physiological stuff, various quantitative energies, and as well tiny qualitative signals which we can determine exist only through their actions. The term “qi” is at the heart of the ability of traditional theory to describe the web of nature’s relations. The term “information” is likewise at the heart of the ability of modern science to describe the web of interactions now known to exist within nature. The term qi is used to refer to and describe mental, emotional, and physical phenomena. The term information is also used in this non-dualist manner.” *

The easiest way to understand systems theory is to use the analogy of a computer. A computer system can be divided into two essentials, the two of which together form the total system – hardware and software. Hardware consists of the tower, the motherboard, the cpu, the monitor etc, all of which are inert without the addition of electricity – our matter/energy dialectic again. Software, on the other hand, is pure information – which is a very fun and strange thing to ponder, since information is non-local. Unlike the “stuff” that makes up your computer, or the electrical energy that drives it, information cannot be pinned down in space/time.

The software that runs on your computer can be “in” your computer. However, it can also exist on a piece of paper, as handwritten lines of code. Taking it one step further, it can exist even more tenuously inside my head. (Well, maybe not my head, but I’ll bet Mark Zuckerberg has lots of lines of code stored in his noggin’.)

Robert Anton Wilson, in his groundbreaking Prometheus Rising, puts it this way –

“The hardware is more ‘real’ than the software in that you can always locate it in space-time – if it’s not in the bedroom, somebody must have moved it to the study etc. On the other hand, the software is more ‘real’ in the sense that you can smash the hardware back to dust (‘kill’ the computer) and the software still exists, and can ‘materialize’ or ‘manifest’ again in a different computer. (Any speculations about reincarnation at this point are the responsibility of the reader, not the author.)” **

In other words, information systems theory gives us a way to concretely describe, perhaps for the first time, what we mean when we talk about the “ghost in the machine.” Our current understanding and popular western philosophy, aka scientific materialism, cannot explain numerous observable phenomena in the natural world. By way of example, again from Chasing the Dragon’s Tail –

“The Acrasiales amoeba is a slime mold inhabiting inland woodlands and forests. Under normal conditions, it is a single-celled organism that lives an independent existence. Yet, when unfavorable conditions arise, the single-celled organisms aggregate to form a multi-celled organism. This larger organism forma a stem and spores, which are released into the environment, where on contact with a favorable medium, they grow and live independently again. This phenomenon is an unusual biological cycle. In spite of the fact that the organism does not have the anatomophysiological systems of higher organisms such as nervous and hormonal systems, it is able to perform this complex multicellular function. Obviously it has a signal system, parts of which have been recently mapped, but we still do not have a clear understanding of its operation.” ***

Viewing “Qi” as information goes a long way to explaining how our medicine may actually work. (And considering that Rabbi Loeb used the Kabbalah, an informational system consisting of a sacred alphabet used in a specific manner – think “software” – it may go a fair bit towards explaining the golem.)  It also goes a long way to explaining how the body heals, and the ultimate mystery - what is life?

“Information can be understood through mathematics as 'negative entropy' or, in a widely used abbreviation, 'negentropy.'  Entropy is a measure of the deadness of a system.  Negentropy, or information, is a measure of the liveliness of a system.  Evolution is always a matter of at least two stochastic processes, each one acting as 'selector' of the other(s).  That is, in non-living systems, where no such 'selection' is involved, entropy (lack of coherence) steadily increases, as stated in the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics.  In living systems, due to stochastic co-selection, negentropy (information) steadily increases.  In Schrödinger’s phrase, 'Life feeds on negative entropy.'  Life is an ordering, selecting, coherence-making process. …Life behaves as if it were always aiming at higher coherence, i.e. higher intelligence.” ****

I highly encourage you to explore more of Dr. Manaka’s work, available from Redwing Books.

SOURCE MATERIAL

* Chasing the Dragon's Tail, by Yoshio Manaka MD, with Kazuko Itaya and Stephen Birch, Paradigm Publications, 1995, pg. xxii

*** ibid, pg. 20

** Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson, New Falcon, 1983, pp. 37-38

**** ibid pg. 112