Chapter 15 On Xuanchou

It is said that civilized people in modern, industrialized societies have a characteristic tendency to be extraordinarily tense, jumpy at the touch of a button, unprecedentedly uneasy about the future, depressed and hopeless about the present, and sleepless nights at the thought of the recent past. into sleep.All this is due to the complex technology and machine noise that surrounds us, and the cold, hard steel and plastic contraptions we build to separate ourselves from the earth.On this view, endless worry is a great modern invention.How to solve it?Only to turn off all engines and crawl back into the country.The primitive man wore a garland of roses and slept soundly.

I don't believe it.Man has always been a peculiarly sad animal, with an almost untapped ability to worry; this is a unique endowment that distinguishes man from other life forms.Undoubtedly, deep in the human brain, there is a nerve center to coordinate this function, just like the center dedicated to hunger and sleep. Prehistoric man, though he had no tools or fire for his thoughts, must have been the saddest of all animals.He groped about in the dimly lit cavern, trying to figure out what he should do; he felt the sacred duty looming before him—making tools.At that time, he must have spent a long time thinking about his thumb and worrying about it.I can imagine how he would stare at his hands, put the tip of his thumb against each other in astonishment, and think, for God's sake, that's what separates us from the beasts; Thoughts: they are generated like this.Why?There must have been many, many sleepless nights with thumbs all over your head.

I should not be surprised to learn that there have been ancient councils from prehistoric times.These committees hold rallies to argue that thumbs may be getting us too far.Our lives would be better off if we had an extra normal finger instead of a thumb. Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of human functions.Now is the time to acknowledge this, and maybe even learn to worry better.Humans are anxious animals.This feature needs further development.Most people tend to overlook this activity, living on thin ice of worry, but never digging deeper. To fully immerse yourself in a pure and enlightening defilement, I can recommend a modified super sitting practice.I came across an article about that kung fu while reading a highly academic magazine and practiced it myself.In my backyard, there is a beech tree.There was a broken canoe overturned under a tree.I sat inside, followed the instructions in the instructions, and started meticulously.Relax, close your eyes slightly, adjust your breathing, and silently recite a mantra, here is "Moo..." over and over again.These requirements are quite suitable for Shanye Sanren; my consciousness, which usually wanders here and there to waste time, grasping what is what is;But at this time, the dingling phone rang in the room, and you didn't care if you recited the mantra of "moo" evenly, it rang several times and then stopped abruptly.At this moment, I suddenly discovered the Xuanchou technique.

Xuanchou Kungfu is simple and easy to practice, anyone, regardless of age, gender or occupational status, can do it on almost any occasion.For beginners, I suggest 20 minutes as a session, do it again in the morning before going to work, and do it again before insomnia at night. What to do is sit down somewhere, preferably alone, and tense all the muscles in your body.If you start by making yourself moderately uncomfortable, say, by sitting on the bottom of a canoe, tension will naturally arise.Now close your eyes and focus on this until the effort to close them causes a slight twitch of the eyelids.Then breathe, thinking analytically about the muscular activity involved in breathing.Best, try breathing through one nostril, alternating between the two.

Now, say the mantra, the mantra is "worry", repeat quickly.The word itself is effective because the history of the word gives it suggestive cognates.In this way, while reading, some memories are inserted horizontally, remembering that it originally comes from the Indo-European root wer, which means bending, twisting, and wanting to escape.The word came to Old English as wyrgan, meaning to suffocate, and close relatives include weird, writhe, wriggle, wrestle, and wrong . "Wrong" is an equally useful mantra, and the reason is equivalent to the word "sorrow". Then, let your consciousness out and let it float.After about three minutes, you can feel this happening.Almost as soon as you float, you start capsizing, sinking.The synthesis of these feelings became a perception: the perception of some serious and irreversible trouble.

Finally, if successful, you will start to hear "clank".It was a rhythmic sound that seemed to come from afar.Its rhythm does not match breathing, nor does it match the rhythm of the mantra.A few minutes later, when you check the pulse carefully, you will find that the "Zheng" sound is synchronized with the pulse, and it comes from the head and neck. It is presumably caused by the turbulent flow at the turning point of an artery, or even the vibration of a platelet.Now, you're on top. There is nothing left but to let the intensified melancholy progress on its own, to the next stage, called the main winch, where you pass a series of images that seem to flow from all directions, chaotic, fleeting, and beating extremely fast However, like a broken movie, many scenes seem insignificant, but each one is connected with a feeling of falling into the sky (here is a useful reminder for you: vertigo "vertigo" is also derived from wer ).You fly through your mind like a bird screaming, and at this moment, you may suddenly see a time-traveling illuminated billboard; A humpback whale, singing its last song to the depths of the empty ocean; or just a TV news broadcast declaring that the present détente means nothing to the Soviet-American artificial heart project.Or it's the latest technological information, involving neutrino pulse showers, sent at people from collapsing planets, and you can't escape, not even at the bottom of the salt mines in South Dakota.And of course, there was Watergate.The music of John Cage, the downward curve drawn in chalk on an academic blackboard, alternately predicting the future size of the American pet dog population, the rats in Harlem, the nuclei overhead and deep in the salt mines Explosions, suicides in Norway, crop failures in India, world population totals; thinking of the attraction of the moon causing baldness, the inevitable continental drift, electric guitars, things slipping away, feeling rugs slipping under things everywhere Going out: These ideas gradually converge, become amorphous, and then disappear into nothingness, merging into a solid, gelatinous skewed thought.Once this happens, you start to enter the final stage, which is pure sorrow about pure sorrow.This is the essence of Western wisdom, which I call Xuanchou.

Now let's talk about the usefulness of Xuanchou.First, it fills up the mind entirely when it is empty.Your mind tends to be full of worries, endless, lingering in the bottom of your heart; always wondering if you have forgotten something to worry about.Not anymore.You get the full experience at once, and there is a time, and the time is arranged by yourself. Secondly, it can make you live a full life when there is no worry in the daytime, and you will be happy because of the contrast between reality and reality. Third, I forgot the third benefit, which means that there is one less thing to worry about.

Of course, there are also disadvantages that need to be faced.I have to admit that Xuanchou is a surrogate experience, a substitute for real sorrow.In this sense, there is always the danger of overdoing it.Another danger is the intervention of technology.I have no doubt that soon there will be an ad, on the last pages of a small literary magazine, for some electronic device, in a black plastic case, with knobs, a display, and a stimulated The humming sound and the terminal can be fixed on various parts of the skull so that the brain wave and Xuanchou echo each other and strengthen each other, and the waveform can be selected at will.Of course, I have to say that if you are not satisfied (or even if you are satisfied), the money will be refunded.These devices are sold under alluring names, such as depression amplifiers, or artificial depression machines.Thinking of this, I added another worry, but this worry may not be a big deal, at most it is like an ordinary car radio.