Quantherapy

 

(1) When to exercise Jing-Guan?

  You don’t have to find a particular period of time to do Jing-Guan, nor need you to practice Jing-Guan when you are at leisure, nor need you to exercise Jing-Guan while keeping a specific posture (such as still-sitting), we just ask you to do Jing-Guan when your emotion is triggered or a desire or thought arises in your mind.

  Thinking and emotional activities are the two aspects of one process, when an idea arises (in your brain), there are usually emotional activities in your body at the same time, sometimes strong, and sometimes weak. For example, you feel a little excited at seeing a picture or hearing an actor’s line on TV, excitement here is an emotional activity. People usually regard excitement as a mental phenomenon, however, if you calm down and carefully observe your body, you’ll find that your excitement is actually a physiological process and a bodily reaction. Modern physiology and psychology tells us that any mood episodes will lead to the inner secretion of various hormones which are detrimental to your health. The awareness that emotion is a physiological phenomenon, a physical activity and a material activity lays a theoretical foundation for us to exercise Jing-Guan.

Emotional activity, of course, is not only a physiological phenomenon, but a mental phenomenon as well. Many people treat emotional activity as mental phenomenon, yet they seldom probe into what’s behind the mental phenomenon. The process of mood episodes may be broken down into two steps, the first step is the rise of thoughts, while the second one is the rise of emotion. These two steps are not separated, but are very closely related to each other as the shadow follows the person. When the first step happens, the second step will inevitably follow, which is to say, there would be no second step without the first step. Under certain circumstances, for instance, when you see a picture (by eye), hear a voice (by ear), smell something (by nose), taste a food (by tongue), touch something (by body), etc., some kind of your memory will be awakened naturally, this memory usually appears as a notion or a wish (thought), when the thought arises, it will distinguish and judge  those information that aroused it: if the circumstance where you are is compatible and consistent with your memory, or it’s good and kind in your opinion, i.e., it’s confirmatory of your memory, you’ll be happy; if it’s incompatible and inconsistent with your memory, or it’s bad or evil in your opinion, you’ll be upset. The occurrence of the emotion, therefore, is related to the thoughts, it’s a psychological and mental phenomenon. Of course, the reason why we say emotion is a mental phenomenon is that it brings us the so-called mental feelings, just like pain, the feelings actually are physiological and material, people merely took it as purely mental phenomenon by mistake. In the past, people treated emotions as purely mental activities, because they could not see any direct relationship between emotional arousal and the external events. Therefore, emotion is a coin that has two sides: the mental side and the physiological side. By understanding this theory, we’ll know that if we want to clear off an emotion, we have to trace back first to the root cause of the emotion —– notions and wishes in the brain. The so-called “rise of an intent” means that a wish, desire, thought or pursuit arises, and the so-called “movement of thoughts” means your notions begin to judge.

  We think the best occasion for Jing-Guan is the moment when your emotion is triggered, for example, when you are painful, angry, excited or glad, because it’s right the moment when a notion or a wish is in action in your brain, so it’s the right time to catch them. As the purpose of Jing-Guan is to eliminate these things, and you have to pinpoint them before you can clear them away. When can you find them then? Only when it is committing a “crime”, can it be caught red-handed. Everyone has numerous wishes and notions, and you can hardly think of them when they are at rest, however, when they stir up your emotion, that would be the right time to catch it. The real objects of Jing-Guan are these notions (including principles, wishes), i.e. the mental attachments that are frequently talked about. For a lot of people, when they begin to practice Jing-Guan, they usually could not call Jing-Guan to their minds when they are in a mood episode, but it doesn’t matter. If you could think of the event afterwards and remember Jing-Guan, you can recall the cause and process of your mood episode at that time, your emotion could still be triggered, and relevant ideas and thoughts would also show up, and then it would be easier for you to exercise Jing-Guan.

(2) What are the Objects of Jing-Guan?

  The objects of Jing-Guan are notions (including wishes) in our brains, because all of our problems and predicaments result from notions (including wishes). All the notions were called delusions in Buddhism in the past to express their disavowal of notions. People would naturally interpret delusions as wrong ideas or bad notions. That’s not the case. In our opinion, all the notions in our brains are delusional, including every notions you’re reading here, and they are consequently the objects of Jing-Guan. This statement might incur objections from those who might lack full understanding of the essence of Jing-Guan. I accept these objections and admit that they have justifications to oppose this statement, but still I have to put it this way. Because, firstly, this is caused by the limitation of human languages. It would need a lot of words and a huge theoretical system to precisely illustrate the implication of this statement. I’d like here to remind you that our languages follow the law of unity of opposites, just like this world where we live, all things, notions, principles and status manifest two opposite sides, that’s why we human beings live in a contradictory world. If we think with, and live on conventional words and logics, we can never solve any contradictions, except for extending them or changing their forms. The ultimate aim of Jing-Guan is to enable our conscious activities (not referring to thinking here, the specific meaning of this term will be discussed later on) and lives go beyond opposites and contradictions, and realize indeed the accordance, harmony or unity (not so accurate) of conscious activities with social activities and life activities, or return to that ultimate “oneness”. This is my argument based on the content of notions. Secondly, the reason why we say that all the notions are delusions, from the perspective of mental cultivation or spirituality, is that all notions/concepts can control our lives, making us go to extremes and consequently harming the others and ourselves. Once again I’d like here to remind you that all concepts are delusions, and there’s no exception, including the sentence “there’s no exception” itself.

(3) What’s the direct purpose of Jing-Guan

  The direct purpose of Jing-Guan is to clear away all the notions/concepts in our brains. Just like what is previously mentioned, this statement is not accurate. A common but not so accurate statement is that we are no longer attached to these notions/concepts. The accurate one is: free our brains from being controlled by these concepts. Nevertheless this meaning is hard to be precisely understood, although you can experience it in your Jing-Guan practice. Every time I talk about these issues, I would always cite“The Tao that can be told of is not the Absolute/constant Tao; The Names that can be given are not the Absolute/constant Names”(from Tao TeChing) to express the difficulties of depicting the states beyond conventional life and conventional consciousness .

 • Preparatory movement

   When you feel your mood swings, try first to calm down your body (standing, sitting or lying postures are all right), close your eyes and turn your attention (awareness) from the outer world to your own body, and observe your body and brain with your heart (awareness of your heart), because the emotional reactions occur simultaneously in the two parts of your body (especially in heart) and brain. With the proficient and in-depth practice of Jing-Guan, anytime when you feel some sort of unease in your heart and brain, like anxiety, impatience, tension, etc., you could turn to Jing-Guan.

 • Detailed process of Jing-Guan

 • After you turn your awareness(attention) back to your body, you have to adjust your mood in the first place (for example, tell yourself to relax your body) and calm down before you can carefully feel the uncomfortableness, strain or stiffness somewhere in your body, otherwise you cannot distinctly observe the uncomfortableness, strain, stiffness, etc. within your body. After you have observed those feelings, you could put your awareness on that position and attentively feel your bodily feelings. That location could be anywhere in your body, from the top of the head to the toe, most often in the internal organs, and the heart in particular. At the initial stage of Jing-Guan practice, these feelings occur mainly in the heart and its surrounding area, such as chest, so I would often talk about feeling your heart region in the following chapters. When you feel uncomfortable, strained or unwell anywhere in your body, you just rest your awareness on that position for a few seconds, usually around 5 seconds, and carefully feel the uncomfortableness,, strain, discomfort, etc. until these feelings disappear and you feel comfortable again, and what is more, your emotions vanish at the moment, and your mind and body return to stillness.

 • If you have observed the heart area for 5 seconds and your body and mind cannot go back to quietude, you could scrutinize the feeling in your brain, you could also feel the stiffness, strain or uncomfortableness there, and then you could keep observing the feeling in your brain for 5 seconds as well, those discomforts would be gone in most cases, and you’ll feel the void and comfort in your brain.

 • If your brain doesn’t turn to emptiness and ease after you observe your brain for 5 seconds, you could check your brain, where you’ll find there’s one or several thoughts in motion, you could now watch them peacefully, just like looking at something which has nothing to do with you, until they disappear.It usually disappears in an instant, and then you’ll feel that your brain becomes empty and comfortable, which indicates that your Jing-Guan is successful. Attention Please! A successful Jing-Guan enables you to feel that your body and mind become quiet, and you can experience the void and ease. However, this feeling probably doesn’t last long, maybe for an instant, it will be gone soon, because the other concepts and emotions will arise.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t mean that you have to go through the three steps one by one, in most cases, any one of them would be enough to solve your problem. As to those concepts and wishes which you are strongly obsessed with, or those deep-hidden thoughts and wishes, however, we probably have to apply all the three steps before we can solve the problem. This is especially true with the new Jing-Guan practitioners. In other words, if you find there’s an emotion that you can’t overcome all the time, you could get through the procedures step by step, starting from the heart, body to brain and concept, you can surely get over it.

It’s worth noting that the awareness and consciousness we are talking about here have the same meaning and actually include two kinds of awareness and consciousnesses. We usually interpret consciousness as a thinking activity, when we observe and feel our emotional activities, however, the consciousness that observes and feels is not the one which people used to take as the thinking, it’s another consciousness in our lives, which is what we callinherent consciousness or innate pure consciousness(or Being). When this inherent pure consciousness arises, we’ll feel still and comfortable there. Whereas when the thinking consciousness is in action, we can always feel a trace of tension there. You can realize the difference between the two if you carefully feel them. Therefore, after the thinking consciousness leads us to where the emotion dwells, it’ll step into the background, and the work is then handed over to the inherent pure consciousness. A smooth handover is the key to a successful Jing-Guan. The reason why many people can’t successfully exercise Jing-Guan and solve their emotional problems is that they didn’t achieve a smooth shift of consciousness, they just used their thinking consciousness to feel their bodily sensations, which inevitably prevented them from exercising a real Jing-Guan, as they did that with a somewhat conscious effort, and they could always feel a trace of tension there. The key to a successful handover is to adjust your mindset/attitude prior to finding that peaceful and soft feeling, after you have felt the feeling which is right behind the emotion, you can use that feeling to observe, perceive and wrap up that block of emotion, no matter you are Jing-Guaning your body or brain. So the keyword here is “Jing” (meaning peaceful and soft sensation), if you can’t experience the feeling of quietude, a sensation of stillness behind the emotional activity(Please bear this in mind: the feeling of stillness is right behind the emotional activity), your Jing-Guan practice will not work. That’s the root cause why we call this technique Jing-Guan. It’s actually very simple to realize the feeling of quietude, you just tell yourself that you want to observe those emotional activities quietly, when you set to observe the feelings, you will naturally experience the feel of stillness. Because your inherent pure consciousness spreads all over your body and it’s always there, as long as you think of it, you could feel it. Just like eating something even in the darkest place, you can always accurately put it into your mouth. This is the instinct of our life, if you naturally look for your mouth, you can surely find it; if you, however, want to find your mouth under the guidance of a theory by means of thinking, you probably can’t find it or pinpoint it. Therefore, the point is that you have to try to find it, you can find it if you go for it. If you don’t try, you’ll never know that. That’s the biggest secret and the most critical knowhow of our life. When you can use it freely one day, you’ll be able to successfully solve all your problems in your life.

People with all kinds of education, especially those who follow certain religion or certain ethic principles would become very nervous and rejectiveof their own emotional reactions, and they would not like to admit the existence of their emotions, especially those that are not allowed or valued by our traditional teachings (such as anger, excitement, etc.).These emotions usually bring people a sense of frustration, that’s why people tend to voluntarily suppress, restrain them, and even would not like the others to know the existence of these emotions. If you have ever carefully observed your emotions, you’ll get to know that the more you reject an emotion, and the more you deny its existence, the stronger it will become. Therefore, it’s not the right practice to deny or reject your emotions, whereas the correct way is to admit its existence and then bring it to Jing-Guan. When you accept its existence, its power will be weakened. When we say that you accept its existence, we mean that you accept the justifiability of its generation and existence in your mind and body without rejection and resistance. Only when we can accept the existence of an emotion, and then peacefully feel, experience or perceive it, will it fade away. 

When we Jing-Guan and feel an emotion or a thought, it signifies that we keep two attitudes toward it, one is that we accept its existence, the other is that we separate it from ourselves, our inherent pure consciousness will voluntarily separate these emotions and concepts /notions from ourselves, which is to say while our true selves are Jing-Guaning, observing or feeling, they have automatically set these concepts and emotions apart from themselves. These two points are the key to the complete Jing-Guan practice. I used to emphasize these two points when I talked about Jing-Guan in the past.

 • Why 3 steps ?

I didn’t exercise Jing-Guan in this way at the beginning. Actually, my practice had two steps at that time. The first step was to feel the emotions, or in other words, to “feel my feelings”. Then I went to look for the cause for my emotional feelings —- a notion in my brain, usually a wish at the very beginning, for instance, I wanted to get something, I wanted to do something, I didn’t want to get something, I didn’t want to do something, I was afraid of getting something, I was afraid of doing something, I wanted to achieve a certain state, etc.. Again for example, I wanted to get money, I wanted to be fairly treated and respected, I wanted to change my fate, I wanted to change the others’ fates, I didn’t want to suffer, I didn’t want the others to suffer, Iwas afraid of being humiliated, I didn’t want to break the law, I didn’t want to do wrong and so on. As long as I had found these causes at the moment and got to know that it was the notion that brought me the emotional pain, I would then peacefully watch these concepts, they woulddisappear immediately, and I would calm down, furthermore, I would experience the delight and tranquility of my body and mind. Sometimes so long as I found that concept, the problem could be solved at once. I had been talking to my friends about this practice for a long time, however, I realized later that they could not follow throughthe steps no matter how hard they practiced, and consequently could not experience the magical effect of Jing-Guan. After exchange of ideas with the beginners and self-testing many times, I found the root cause of this bottleneck.As a result, I have brought about these three steps. The three-step practice is particularly suitable for those who have a sophisticated thinking brain and haven’t got any religious training.

Firstly, we are more sensitive to the emotional feelings in the body than feelings and notions in the brain, as all of us know that our emotions reactions are in our bodies, and everyone has ever experienced their emotions. Starting with the observation of emotional reactions and emotional feelings in our bodies is therefore the easiest way to exercise Jing-Guan and everyone can make it.

Secondly, we ask you to experience directly the emotional reactions in your body without the involvement of your thinking consciousness, so it’s easier for you to feel and experience your feelings, without activating your thinking consciousness, consequently you can easily make use of your inherent pure consciousness. When we directly observe the emotional reactions in our bodies, almost all of us can naturally feel our feelings with our inherent pure consciousness. This is the key to a successful Jing-Guan, and it’s also the fundamental difference between our Jing-Guan and other similar practices, such as Vipassana, and other mindfulness practice. This crux decides whether you can achieve the aforesaid effects by means of Jing-Guan. Even if you are illiterate, as long as you know, however, how to use this inherent pure consciousness to experience and feel all your physical and mental reactions, you can solve all the problems in your life. What is more, you can inadvertentlyreach the highest stage you could possibly achieve in your cultivation, purify your life, get rid of all your aberrances/degradations and clear off all the impurities in your life in the fastest way. This is the supreme secret and the secret of secrets.All the other secrets won’t matter to you if you are enlightened ofthis secret. I hope all my readers could take this seriously and realize the truthfulness in what I have just said.

Nonetheless, I have also discovered such a phenomenon that when we observ our emotional feelings in our bodies at the very beginning, it was very easy for us to use the inherent pure consciousness to experience/feel, but when we got familiar with this mental act and knew something about this practice, sometimes we would intentionally or inadvertently follow through this process with our thinking consciousness.In this case, we’d have activated our thinking consciousness, and as a consequence, Jing-Guan practice would not work. Hence, when you find that you cannot successfully practice Jing-Guan, you have to observe and experience whether you have calm down yourself and whether you have felt the tranquility behind the emotional feelings, if you can find that tranquility, you will be able to practice Jing-Guan smoothly.

Thirdly, sometimes those uncomfortable and stressful feelings inside your body just couldn’t vanish and your body and mind couldn’t return to peacefulness no matter how hard you have tried to feel them, this could be attributable to the notions or thoughts in the brain. Please bear this in your mind: The root cause of all the emotional reactions is the notions and their activities in the brain. So we can directly Jing-Guan the notions/thoughtsat this time. This is the way I do. Nonetheless, I found many people didn’t know how to Jing-Guan that notion/thought, or in other words, they didn’t know how to watch that notion/thoughtquietly. Because they didn’t know how to watch that notion or Jing-Guan that thought,manypeople might ask,“how can I see the notion/thought in my brain?” Therefore many people would not be able to follow it through if I put it in this way. If we feel the feeling in our brains, however, that would make things much easier. Why do I ask people to feel the feelings in their brains then? The reason is also quite simple, because those feelings are just the results of a notion being activated or thoughtsin action, and so the place where we feel the feeling is right the part of brain where our thought is on the move. If you carefully experience it you’ll know whenever there is a notion in action in your brain, especially when you are having an emotional reaction, you will feel the feelings somewhere in your brain, or more specifically, they’re the uncomfortable feelings of stiffness, tension etc., which are caused by these active notions in your brain. Different notions exist and operate in different locations in our brains, so we can feel the feelings are in different locations in our brain. Accordingly, at the time when we feel the feelings in our brains, we’ve caught the notion itself, if we are mindful at the moment, we’ll find that there’s a notion in action in your brain; if you observe it silently at this moment, it will be gone, it’s been actually cleared away. Nonetheless, when we feel the feelings in our brains, we should feel them with our inherent pure consciousness rather than our thinking consciousness. The distinction here is the same as we feel our emotional reactions in our bodies. If you can feel the still and comfortable place behind the discomfort in your brain, you have found the inherent pure consciousness, which we call inherent self or true self or Being, and then you can feel those uncomfortablefeelings with this quiet and cozy inherent pure consciousness until they disappear.

Fourthly, when our emotional reaction is strong and complicated, we could feel that our brains are heavy and messy if we experience the feelings in our brains, and our heads are in a stiff, blocked and chaotic state. It seems that sometimes observation or Jing-Guan doesn’t work no matter how hard we practice Jing-Guan under such circumstances. Actually that’s not true. We could observe first those active notions in our brains at the moment. There are usually several notions/thoughts on the move at the same time atthis moment, these notions are often the “truths” or “common senses” we take for granted and insist on.What is more, they are in conflict with each other. These notions all want to dominate and control our brains, which consequently make us feel bad or even get a headache. For example, something inside your brain tells you that the others are so wrong, you’re so innocent, you’re so reasonable, your ideas make sense, how you should do, what you should obtain, what the others should do, how should they do, what the others should get, and so on. People tend to get into this kind of complicated concept activities by this time and cannot come to Jing-Guan.People at this moment are most likely to make such a mistake that they would follow these notions(this is right the living state of ordinary people) and get lost in thoughts without being able to extricate themselves. In the meantime,they would be deeply trapped in emotions and consequently in agony, sometimes they would unreasoningly take various impulsiveactions which might  have disastrous consequences. What you should do now is to calm down yourself first, preferably taking several deep breaths, you can also observe your breath, experiencing the breathe- in and breathe-out until your mind quieting down, and then you’ll be able to observe carefully the notions in action in your brain, Jing-Guaning them one by one, and gradually you can solve your problems. However, the biggest difficulty you are facing now is that your whole brain is in a stiff and numb state; as a result, people tend to forget to calm down and find first the sense of tranquility behind those feelings, so Jing-Guan is of no effect at this moment. Only when people find that feeling and Jing-Guan or feel it little by little, can they solve all their problems and bring peace back to their brains. If your brain really cannot achieve stillness, you could come back to your heart again and observe your emotional feelings or physical sensations in your body, after the emotional feelingsare cleared away from your heart area (or other part of your body), your brain will become quiet, void/clear and comfortable immediately. In other words, if you find that your brain is messy and cannot calm down, you could come back to your heart and make a fresh start.

It should be noted that when we exercise such Jing-Guan and observation, we could sometimes draw fierce resistance from notions, many notionswould spring up in your brain and tell you that Jing-Guan is useless, they could even tell you how important these concepts are to you, they are truths which you should stick to, what dangers you’ll be faced with and what losses you’ll suffer if you don’t stick to them and so on. Many people could get confused, feel lost and finally give up Jing-Guan under such circumstances. How could this happen? Because mankind usually lives under the control of his own notions, the way these notions control our lives is to control our emotions. The reason why the emotion can control our lives is that human beings instinctively seek pleasure and avoid suffering. We would like to do things from which we can get joy and pleasure, and we are willing to be close to those who can bring us the feelings of joy and pleasure. Conversely, we would like naturally to stay away from the things or people who would bringus unpleasant feelings. If a notionin a man’s mind is very strong, it will evoke a strong emotion which might even be strong enough to completely control this man’s life. So all we human beings live for those notions. Those strong notions have powerful energy and even have consciousness, when you’re trying to Jing-Guan it, it knows that you want to wipe it out, so it fiercely resists, the way it resists is to make you feel more painful and very painful. If you will is not strong enough, you could probably let it go. It could also play another trick—-it might immediately make a lot of excuses and repeatedly tell you how important, how correct, how reasonable, how kind and how valuable it is. These notions are those that you usually regard as correct and good. If you’re less conscious of that, you could let it off the hook. Just like a criminal being caught by the policemen, he would try to be tough at first and directly resist the arrest, if this move doesn’t work, he would make excuses to shirk his responsibilities. We must therefore have a clear perception and a strong will at this time. Many practitioners can’t carry on with Jing-Guan just because they flinch under such circumstances. So everybody should be steadfast at the moment, because this is the critical moment when you can really change your own life styles, improve your own life and promote your spirituality. If you can tough it out several times in such moments, that would be much easier for you to practice Jing-Guan later on. As I said just now, such moments are usually the ones when one can eliminate something that he or she is most attached to, elimination of such attachments therefore has the most obvious effects in raising one’s morality and spirituality, and enabling one most to experience the miraculous effects of Jing-Guan as well. So when you come to this critical moment, you must stand firm and never relent!

For many of our friends, looking at the notions in action in their brains seems hard to understand. In fact, you don’t have to understand this issue, you can surely see that as long as you look at it, of course, you don’t look at it with your eyes, when you feel the feelings in your brain, you will naturally look at it with your consciousness if you want to see it, and you can certainly see it, actually you can feel it somewhere in your brain, it could be in the forehead, maybe in the top of the head, or at the back of the head, etc.. Hence when you feel the feelings in your brain, you’ll look at the concept naturally with your consciousness instead of your eyes and you won’t miss it.

Let me repeat the basic procedures of Jing-Guan: when you find the emotional activities or unwell feelings in your body —- let your body calm down, close your eyes and feel the emotional reaction in your body —- feel the feelings in your brain —- watch the concepts in your brain —- your brain and body become void, quiet, comfortable and soft.

The above-mentioned Jing-Guan procedure start from the emotions, it’s the easiest-to-learn and most efficient procedure, and can solve all your problems in your physical and mental cultivation. As your Jing-Guan practice goes  in-depth, the activities of notions usually are not so obvious, and you can just feel the physical and mental feelings, this Jing-Guan technique could work even more effective then.