What means the determined will and the noble integrity of a person? Does a scholar, or a gentleman or a soldier acting on behalf of their true hearts describe any meaning of a person’s determined will and noble integrity?
I think it does, and so did our ancestors. They created the character 志 to present a person’s innate purpose and determinate will, to describe a person’s noble integrity.
志 with 士- scholar, gentleman, or soldier on top of a 心-heart, it vividly draws a picture of a determined person with strong self-awareness and wills.
There is a tough guy in my life who deserves this tough character 志.
China’s most beautiful landscape avenue, Sichuan-Tibet Line 318 National Road, is the best choice for cyclists to challenge the limit:
1) A total length of 2,142 kilometers, 14 mountains, with an average altitude of more than 4,000 meters and about 100 kilometers distance cycling a day.
2) Snowy mountains, hail, exposure to the burning sun, and high temperatures happen in one day;
3) Altitude sickness because of riding uphill and downhill in a single day’s attitude ranging from 2600 meters to 5130 meters extremely requires and challenges human body physical limit.
Every year, there are countless groups of cyclists cycling there to taste the limits of life.
He was a member of one cyclist team there years ago. When he told me how his days looked like to him, this was his words with tears and laughter: “问坡何时止，坡曰骑到死！” — “When asked the uphill road when it would end, it says: Until you ride to your death!”
When the uphill road never ends, when the body physical limit is constantly being broken, when you seem to be the only one on this world on that never-ending cycling road, when you have very limited water and food in your back bag to save energy, when your whole body is completely exhausted and in massive muscle soreness…, your innate determined will to not give up is the only thing that drives you towards your daily purpose,…, and your life purpose.
This applies to everyone in everyday life, as well as career and business. It is just that we need to get a chance to discover our deep innate purpose and our strong will in reaching it and never giving up.
When the 14-year-old girl Quan Hongchan won the gold medal in the Tokyo Olympic Women’s 10-meter diving platform with a world record high score, her strong will is to earn money for mom’s illness treatments. Nothing could move her from her strongest will to perfectly complete each of her dives.
In the end, strong wills and determinations are coming from human hearts: love. A person with 志- innate purpose, determinate will, and noble integrity is a person of love.
In 2008, Dr. David Vesely, the chief scientist of the Health Science Research Center of the University of South Florida, found that the heart can secrete the last-life hormone, it can not only kill more than 95% of cancer cells within 24 hours, and it also has an excellent therapeutic effect on other terminal diseases.
And, the human heart is the only place in the body that barely grows cancer cells.
Why?
If we look at Chinese characters, for all the human internal organs, besides 心-heart, all the others,肝- Liver, 脾- spleen, 肺-lung, 肾- kidney,胃- stomach, and 肠-intestine have a root character 月 which means the materialized flesh of the body.
Why?
Taoism and TCM say: “心主神明” – The heart governs the deity.
The deity refers to the mental consciousness and thinking activities, and in Taoism and TCM’s viewpoints, it is the key master of the human body and soul. When a person is settled physically and mentally, and the mood is stable, the body will quickly regain strength. So:
“The best doctor is you, naturally the healthiest. The heart is the strongest medicine, and the human body has its own repair and self-heal mechanism.”
Thinking in reverse, the biggest and best way to control a person is to scare him, to fill him with fear. Diseases and misfortune will follow him then.
Chinese characters have been in the process of development and simplification from graphics to graphical characters over history.
In pursuing the benefits for common people in China and the rest of the world to learn the language more easily, our government Community Party of China initiated further simplification of Chinese characters. It was a people-centered process over tens of years, by listening to and collecting feedback from people.
Today, some people are questioning why a more pictographic 鬥-fight was changed into 斗-fight which seems not vividly telling the essential meanings of a fight. Let’s dig deep to understand the reason!
斗 originally meant the bucket part of the Big Dipper北斗星, the brightest constellation over the North Pole, the sign and guide of the north, with its handle’s direction telling the four seasons. In modern people’s perspectives, finding our True North means discovering personal direction and purposes.
斗 also meant bucket containers and units of measurement used to measure the volume of grains, rice, water, alcohol,…, those important materialized supplies humans got from nature. One 斗 = ten liters.
鬥, the un-simplified version 斗, vividly drew out two people twisting each other’s hair and fighting hard.
Why instead of using the vividly fighting 鬥, Chinese people chose 斗 to represent fight nowadays?
In Taoism’s theories, the human abdomen is the True North of their body and life energy, as: 1) all human life materialized supplies from nature are further digested and absorbed there; 2) human reproductive systems generate new lives.
Like the vast majority of animals on Earth, if life is simply eating, drinking, pooing, peeing, and giving birth to new lives, then a person has an abdomen to complete most of these functions. In order to ensure food, drink, and place of residence of oneself and one’s offspring, competitions, struggles, and fights among creatures emerge. At this point, 鬥 seems enough to describe the fight.
But, for humans with independent consciousness, when competitions, struggles, and fights exist, it also relates to human thoughts, minds, and spirits than simply materialized body needs.
People pursue their meaningful direction and purpose of life continuity and #prosperity.
We have an old saying: 不为五斗米折腰 – don’t bend your waist for five Buckets of rice! Chinese people used it to express our not coveting to material comforts, not bowing to the power, but maintaining the dignity and quality of human beings in facing materialized attractions.
Now, we see, our people intended to always remind ourselves that 斗-fight more strongly comes out of self-awareness to understand our purpose, to “fight” against ourselves between pursuing material comforts and a spiritual #purpose, instead of fight with others violently.
There is big #wisdom in the simplification of this character from 鬥 to 斗 by people.
There was a white rabbit who loved the beauty of nature. She especially liked the moon. In her eyes, the moon’s dimness and brightness, waxing, and waning were full of charm.
So the king of the universe summoned her and said that she had a unique talent for admiring the moon and decided to give her the moon.
From then on, the moon was no longer everyone’s moon but belonged to this white rabbit alone.
The white rabbit still went to the grassland in the forest to watch the moon every night.
However, it was strange to say that the former leisure mood was wiped out, and there was only one thought in her mind: “This is my moon!” She stared at the moon firmly, just like a rich man stared at his cellar of gold.
Dark clouds covered the moon, and she became nervous, lest the treasure be lost;
When the full moon was turning into a waning moon, her heart ached, as if she had been robbed.
In her eyes, the moon’s dimness and brightness, waxing, and waning were no longer of charm and joy, but dangers were repeated, which evokes endless troubles and illusions of gains and losses.
Years ago, one day, I had a short conversation with my little girl who had just received kindergarten education in Canada for less than 1.5 years after our settle down.
“Baby, we are going to celebrate an important festival, the Dragon Boat Festival, in days. And we will enjoy a feast of Zongzi (粽子).”
“What’s Zongzi? Why we will celebrate this festival?” She asked.
“It is to memorize a great poet, QuYuan, in China history centuries of years ago.”
“But why we eat Zongzi? What is the dragon boat?”
“QuYuan loved his country very much. When he realized the country was in danger of the devil and he failed in saving it, he dedicated his life by jumping into a river… This touched and waked up many many people. They made Zongzi and threw Zongzi into the river to feed fish. They also drove dragon boats to scare away fishes from eating his body.”
The little girl took over my sentence and said with no hesitation: “Oh. He did not like his body. He should love himself and should not jump into the river to die.”
A sharp astonishment hit me.
“Baby, you are right. Everyone should love and cherish their life, their body. But when evil things happen in our environment, damaging the world, nobody can live well. We all need to do our best to fight for the better, sometimes at a high cost. Because, if everyone thinks it is not their responsibility, the problem will never be solved.”
With beanstalks burning under the pot, the beans are boiled and weeping in the pot.
Originally grow from the same root, why do they torture each other so hard? The beans that are burned and cooked are the beans that grow from the same root as themselves.
In English: “If my children and grandchildren are as extraordinary as me, then I don’t need to leave money for them, because too much money kills the fighting spirit of talented people.
If my children and grandchildren are mediocre, then I don’t need to leave money for them. Being dull but having too much money will increase his fault.“
What did Lin Zexue leave to his descendants? Virtuous and wisdom.
Someone went home at a night and saw a blind man carrying a lantern in his hand.
He asked the blind man, “You can’t see yourself, but why you are carrying a lantern?”
The blind man said: “Carrying this lantern, I don’t have to worry that others will bump into me, and I don’t have to worry that I will cause inconvenience to others.”
Being self-centered means that you can’t see good scenery, and it will only plunge you into a whirlpool of anxiety and irritability.
Empathy, mutual understanding, is human’s top #wisdom, but also the highest level of #kindness.
As mentioned in the commonality of the legends on the human origin between the eastern and western cultures many times earlier, can we assume that the human origin does have no essential difference between the East and the West? As, no matter what race, with what religion or beliefs, the East and the West all call the earth our Mother Earth instead of Father Earth. And our same Mother Earth is widely regarded as with a Kun character of ever giving and gentle nourishing everything on this planet.
Our Mother Earth has her own energy system, to maintain her own life, healthy and long-lasting.
In the middle of this Kun life earth, there is the high-temperature geocentric core energy originated from the Qian universe, the sun. Between the middle and the surface of our Mother Earth is the earth’s soil, including the mantle layer and crust layer. And on the surface are water, mountains, rivers, and gas. The internal is the core, the energy center of our Mother Earth. She exquisitely acquires new energy from the sun and stores the energy in the middle, warms and nurtures her body, the soil, the water, the gas, and the mountains. Water plays a great role in adjusting her body temperature and cooling her down. When there is extra heat from the core, such as volcanic eruption and magma eruption, water plays one of the most important roles in cooling it down. And her air on the surface is the best thermal insulation layer to protect her from losing heat into outer space.
Our Mother Earth has her own respiratory and circulatory systems. What we can directly observe are countless deep holes leading to the deep ground, groundwater, and surface water circulation system in her shallow surface. In her deep ground, there stored her internal gas and oils, which are playing important roles in her life.
While our Mother Earth revolves around the sun, she gets different amounts of energy from the sun at different times of one year, so her body developed a systematic process in maintaining the energy of different parts of her body in a harmonious and balanced state.
There is a way that humans can intuitively feel the different processes of energy absorption and radiation of Mother Earth, that is, by feeling the changes in the temperature of the well water. Our ancestors have long discovered this phenomenon: the water in the deep well is warm in winter, but cool in summer.
The ancestors had the scientific spirit to break the casserole to the end. They further discovered on the basis of their intuitive experience: the surface of Mother Earth is cold in winter, while the underground is warm, and it is the time the geothermal heat is emitted little by little inside out. In the hot summer, when the surface is hot, the underground is cool, and the geothermal energy is not scattered outward, but the core energy is restrained. It is the time Mother Earth collects energy inward.
Further considering the northern and southern hemispheres of Mother Earth, the northern hemisphere surface is hot outside and cool inside, while the southern hemisphere surface is cool outside and hot inside. As a result, the surface energy of the entire earth is a uniformly distributed balance of Yin and Yang. If we further think, we will realize Mother Earth’s internal thermal energy’s change pattern. When her northern side is absorbing and retaining energy, her southern half is emitting energy, and as her position around the sun changes, the northern side starts to emit and the southern side starts to retain and absorb. The same cycle repeats every year and never stops.
Seeing Mother Earth as a huge image hanging in the air, she is like a huge Kan. The Kan Hexagram comes from the Kun Hexagram of pure Yin, and in the middle of the extreme pure Yin is the pure Yang originated from the Qian Hexagram. This pure Yang energy warms the world and supports all life on our Mother Earth.
The Qian is heaven. The Qian is the sun.
When we introduce Jiji Hexagram, it briefs us that the human head is the human body’s south and the human abdominal area is the human body’s north. Or, the human head belongs to Li Hexagram while the human abdominal area belongs to Kan Hexagram.
Jiji
In Taoism’s theories, the human body’s south, the Li, includes head and heart that connect to human’s thoughts, minds, and souls. Human eyes, as the window of the human heart, belong to Li too. And they also think that the human body’s north, the Kan, includes the kidney, reproductive system, and endocrine system. Human ears, connecting to the belly through meridians, belong to Kan too.
So, how do the human body’s south fire and north water work on each other for the entire body’s health?
Nature is the greatest magician. But why does it put the human body’s fire on top of its water?
The direct and simplest answer is that there is Yang in Yin, and there is Yin in Yang.
Although the human abdominal area is of the water energy, it is this water energy that fuels Yang Qi energy from the “deep sea” and it is also the cradle of the most active and vibrant new life. Pure Yang Qi arises from deep inside the human Kan abdominal area.
Although the human head and heart belong to Li fire energy, human brain nervous system is Yin and controls hormone secretion. The human hormone is one of the most essential Yin elements controlling human life. The human heart processes blood. Human fluid circulation system and the endocrine system both belong to Yin Qi energy. They are the Yin in the middle of Li.
Human birth, aging, sickness, and death are like the four seasons of the earth. They are all energy transformation processes. Life is all about energy’s movement. Life is all about the energy’s transformation between water and fire.
Newborns have the highest water content. Their skin is supple and their body is soft. The moisture in the body of the elder gradually loses, and their skin and bones are calcified. Once a person dies, the body is completely stiff and can no longer store water.
Beauty-loving women, when they apply the most precious skincare and moisturizing products to their faces in order to resist the signs of time is there any way to use the most precious beauty and skincare products inside their bodies? Is there such a treasure in the human body?
Aging begins with the aging of the brain, which is manifested in the inability to move the feet. Normally, an old man with quick thinking has quick hands and feet. Why does aging start with the brain? Because of lacking the fire energy, life’s Yang Qi.
Life is like cooking a kettle of water.
If the fire is too strong, it might quickly burn and dry the water. If there is no continuous water production, life will be burned out quickly.
If the fire is very weak, too weak to heat the water, life will be cold with blocked Qi and Blood, in the misery of sicknesses.
Only if the fire is right for the water, heat the water to boil, control the fire but make it constant firing; control the water and supplement it while the life is generating more life water. Life will be a balanced, warm and happy long life.
Taoism tells us a human’s body is born to have the capability to live for hundreds to thousands of years, but humans are always wasting and over consuming their life water and fire energy. Does Taoism give guidance on how to maintain the cooking of our life with our own water and fire energy?
1 Green Planet 