by William E. Douglas, Jr.
I have been on a 40 year journey around the planet studying and teaching meditative practices, which 25 years ago led me into the halls of modern medicine and science.
My journey started in a Tai Chi Meditation class at South Coast Community College in Southern California where I went to find relief from stress and depression. This sparked a sojourn which led me to a Taoist Temple in Hong Kong setting the stage for a lifetime of teaching Tai Chi and Meditation through many of the world’s largest health networks and institutions, and in some of the world’s largest corporations.
My first hospital class was at a major medical center in Johnson County Kansas, Shawnee Mission Medical Center, where several health professionals attended that first Tai Chi Meditation class out of pure curiosity. What they experienced changed their lives, and blew their minds. In 8 weeks of this class some doctors got off hypertension medications they had been on for years. A surgeon in the class regained full mobility and no longer suffered chronic pain a car accident years before had left her with.
These doctors then scurried to their hospital’s data base to search for “Tai Chi medical research” which ultimately initiated a multi-decade exploration of emerging scientific research that showed that ancient mind-body practices could save our planet trillions of dollars in saved healthcare costs. This in itself was so profoundly exciting it kept me sailing on this course for all these many years.
Yet this hospital experience revealed to me an even greater potential of these practices, one of changing the consciousness and behavior of our entire planet.
Report from a meditation student in class:“You know Bill, I’ve noticed since I started meditation, I don’t flip nearly as many people off on the freeway as I used to.”
My imagination was initially sparked when one of the health professionals attending that first hospital session, an ER (Emergency Room) physician, was so affected by these practices I introduced him to that he resigned from his ER position and began a private naturopathic medical practice in another city where he is very successful today. He was at first perplexed and a bit frustrated by the meditation practices taught in my class. Then a few weeks later, he told me, “Bill, I think I get the meditation now.”
When I asked him to expand on that, he replied, “My ER staff told me this week, ‘John, we don’t know what you’ve been doing, but you are way easier to get along with, so please keep doing it.’”
Years later, because of a best-selling Tai Chi book I had written, I was invited to present Tai Chi and Meditation to inmates at Folsom State Prison in California, where I discovered that they had actually had a Tai Chi Chih program for about 2 years before I arrived. One inmate in that group tracking prison statistics over those years found that not only had behavior rates improved for the meditation group, but for the entire prison. The recidivism rates (return to prison rates) which are normally as high as 70% in American prisons, had dropped to about 30% for the meditation group—and again, incident rates/behavior rates for the entire prison had improved.
I would later learn of Apodaca Prison in Mexico—the site of one of Mexico’s most violent prison events—which saw ZERO events of extreme violence after implementing a meditation program for 700 inmates, and prison guards and administrators, as reported by Mimi Yagoub, writing for InSight Crime, in a November 16, 2016 article entitled, “How Meditation Reduced Violence in a Mexico Prison.”
I began to wonder ‘What the heck is going on here?’ How could a mind-body technique improve the behavior of not just meditators, but of the entire institution? This sparked my interest in not just the medical research on the physical health aspects of mind-body practices, but on the effects in the brain, nervous system, and behavior of practitioners of meditation—eventually leading me to breakthroughs in physics and chaos mathematics, as I strove to understand how changes “inside meditator’s brains” could somehow affect the people, institutions, and communities around those meditators. This multi-decade journey around the world became vast and deep—requiring a great flexibility from me that meditation enabled.
My Tai Chi study with masters and teachers around the world and my study of the great works of Taoism—which is the philosophy of Tai Chi—complemented my past study majoring in Sociology at the University of Kansas at Fort Hays. This Taoist/Sociology training enabled me to see the profound global implications of how human behavior was changed in students in my hospital and prison classes.
Sociologists look at individual behavior as part of a larger social trend, and ancient Taoists saw the world this way as well. In Tai Chi’s Taoist philosophy this is called the “microcosm within the macrocosm,” and is a major tenet of Taoism. The famous Yin Yang symbol is called the Tai Chi symbol by Taoists. The white/black dots within the black/white waves of the Yin Yang symbol are actually smaller Yin Yang symbols, and within the smaller dots in those are yet smaller images of that symbol, and on and on into infinity.
Viewing all this with a ‘microcosm within the macrocosm’ Taoist/Sociological perspective—these revelations of improved health and behavior in these local health professionals, validated by the research they then discovered in their hospital’s data system showing this was happening on a wider scale, coupled with my Folsom Prison experience where inmates beyond the meditation classes experienced evolved consciousness and behavior—it all offered electrifying implications for the world.
I understood what Taoists had extolled for centuries. When they asserted that as the individual body heals, the community’s body heals, the state, nation and world’s body heals. When the individual’s consciousness evolves, the world’s consciousness and behavior evolves—which I eventually came to see as an example of Chaos Mathematics’ self-replicating fractal nature of the universe, which came into vogue in popular publications and block buster films over my decades of research.
Such breakthroughs in physics and mathematics led me to consider: Is the aberrant behavior of war on a global scale really so different than the deviant behavior of prison inmates who fight or misbehave in prison, other than the fractal scale of it?
If mind-body practices could calm the microcosmic society of a prison, would the self-replicating fractal nature of reality not suggest they would calm the macrocosmic conflict of the world which we call war? If the conflicts within an entire prison reduced because the consciousness of a small percentage of that prison’s prisoners was changed, how would globally changing consciousness impact war?
My mind spun madly at this fractal image of possibility. When the United States spends 54 cents on every discretionary spending tax dollar on military—how many trillions of dollars in savings would reduction in global conflict create?
Here in my hometown of Kansas City we have perhaps the greatest World War I Museum. When you enter the museum one of the first exhibits is a copy of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. It discusses the issue of how a European idea of social Darwinism helped fuel the start of World War I, by affecting people’s consciousness to believe their own superiority over others. This is not a judgement of Darwin’s book, only an “interpretation” people took from it, and how it affected their consciousness, which resulted in a massive change in human behavior that made possible one of history’s most massive scale horrific events.
I mention this for one reason—to illustrate how the world forms around the state of human consciousness. This may explain why all major religions focused on prayer and the “state of our consciousness.” Prayer of all forms was designed to alter our state of consciousness, even though much of religion has devolved into dogmatic legal systems of rules of behavior over time. But at their core inception prophets from whom major religions were founded upon, had personal insights and awakenings that spoke of approaches to change inner consciousness.
Within all religions there were less dogmatic movements that maintained the original focus on consciousness, which are often referred to as esoteric branches of religion, such as: Islam’s Sufism; Christianity’s Gnostics; Judaism’s Kabbalists; etc. But these tend to be smaller movements within modern organized religions, even though they may be closer to the religion’s original intent.
A clear illustration of this dynamic is seen in China’s Taoism vs. Confucianism in Chinese approaches to life. Taoists focused on the inner realms of how our consciousness forms and manifests, while Confucianism focuses on a set of external rules that one should follow for fear of being ostracized by society. You may have heard the Chinese phrase “saving face,” which connotes a fear of what society will think of you. Taoists are famous for not giving a hoot about what society thinks of them, but rather being true to an inner flow and universal truth that arises from inner awareness. The Christian Gnostics, Islamic Sufis, and Jewish Kabbalists felt similarly.
Why are these esoteric approaches to religion less widespread than the more dogmatic orthodox approaches, if facts suggest the original prophets who sparked those religions were very similar to these esoteric/ethereal seemingly renegade sects? One reason is because due to their inner consciousness approach, they are less externally organized or ordered. However, politics may be at the heart of this as well. If people feel a direct connection to universal truth, and don’t have to depend on external institutions for it—that makes a population quite a bit less controllable—therefore it would have been in the self-interest of those in power through the centuries to promote dogmatic religion over esotericism’s “inner awareness.” Also it could cut down on the donations religious institutions receive, if populations were taught they had their own direct connection to the divine. But I digress; this is another discussion for another book.
Back to the dogmatic Confucian systems vs. the Taoist approach; Taoists believed that by letting go of external attachments we could tap into an inner flow, an elegant natural order they called “the Tao,” or the way of the universe that would lead to the most common good. Whereas the Confucianists saw a need for external rules to keep society in order.
The same is true of Judaism’s Kabbalists, Islam’s Sufis, and Christianity’s Gnostics whose focus was on one’s ability to touch into an elegant natural order as a nebulous personal experience of expansive awakening via changes in consciousness—as opposed to the more extent practices of those religions that rely on “external rules” to limit behavior.
I explain this because this is more in line with how modern society views the world. We see human problems and set about trying to fix these problems with laws and rules to harness or herd human behavior in desired ways. In America, for example, we have increasingly tried for recent decades to solve crime by legislating tougher laws, which resulted in America imprisoning more of its people than any nation on Earth.
The Taoist approach would be to look at the Folsom and Mexican Prison effect, how prisoners’ changed their consciousness at its core through a combination of mind-body meditation practice. This changed their behavior at its core or root, rather than using external rules to cajole behavior through fear of punishment.
Here is a simple way of viewing these different approaches. Society today tries to treat the ills of the tree of humanity by discovering and then treating the sick leaves of our culture/society individually. Crime, illness, depression, greed, conflict, etc. being the leaves we try to treat in multitudinously different ways—police/courts/prisons, medical institutions, psychiatry, laws/statutes, all seeking to change these issues from the outside in. This is the Confucian approach.
The Taoist approach would be to ‘affect the state of human consciousness’, or the tree of humanity’s very root, from where all things form, whether it is health, lawfulness, wellbeing, cooperation vs. conflict.
This is obviously a much cheaper, more efficient way to solve society’s problems. Because when a person starts to Meditate, or do Yoga, Tai Chi, or Qigong because of their hypertension, they often discover that they also sleep better at night, they also get sick less as their immune system is boosted, and they become more enjoyable to be around at home, and they become more productive in their career and endeavors, less likely to wind up in court or prison, etc.
Excerpt from “The Gospel of Science” (pages 27-35, and 285-289)