Rabbi Josh Jacobs-Velde: Exploring the Chi/Chiut Parallel

Who is This Aliveness I Am?
By Rabbi Josh Jacobs-Velde

Rabbi Mike Comins has opened up a wonderful channel of theory and practice with his teaching, contained in A Wild Faith, on the parallel between the Chinese Daoist idea of "chi" and the Hasidic idea of "chiut." Building on this insight, Rabbi Mike has made qigung an important practice component of Jewish wilderness spirituality. In this short piece, I’d like to go deeper into the chi/chiut parallel, bringing two important primary Hasidic texts into the discussion, as well as clarifying some issues in chiut practice.

First, what is chiut in Hasidic sources? The root meaning of chiut is connected with the word for alive, "chai," and indeed a frequent biblical prooftext cited by Hasidic authors is "You enliven (m’chayei) them all."(Nechemiah 9:6)  Hasidut  inherited and embraces the Kabbalistic emanationist worldview, whereby our world is sustained moment to moment by the continuous emanation of Divine energy—or Divine "speech" in the root metaphor of Jewish tradition—from  the most hidden reaches of Divinity. Chiut is what vivifies and enlivens creation.

Moshe Idel, in Hasidism Between Ecstasy and Magic, notes that chiut is a way of giving language to Divine immanence. Indeed, part of the nature of chiut is its palpability, its experiential quality as aliveness or vital energy. One of the Hasidic texts that speaks most frequently of chiut is the Meor Eynaim, by Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl. In one passage, he writes that if one has lost access to deeper levels of awareness of Divinity, one should remember that "the Holy One is called 'the life of all life' (chei ha’chayim), and that for any creature in the world, whether birds, animals or humans, their chiut is the Blessed Holy One. That One is the chiut of all life. If a person has fallen from their level, he should think 'Am I not alive?' And Who is this chiut of mine? Is it not the Blessed Holy One?" The late Rabbi David Zeller z’l made this teaching into a beautiful song (I Am Alive) that could be a helpful part of anyone’s chiut practice.

It is rare that a Hasidic text gives such a palpable sense of chiut: it is as though the Meor Eynaim is giving a practice instruction to feel into our aliveness. Indeed, I find that when I sit still and allow my mind to settle, the simple feeling of subtly pulsating aliveness is indeed present. 

More often, the Hasidic mention of chiut is not connected to experience, but is part of the articulation of the Hasidic emanationist "view" of the nature of reality, such as in this text from the Tanya of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the core text of Chabad Hasidut:

The reason that every created thing appears to us as a self-existing entity is because our physical eyes do not see the power of the Holy One and the breath of It's mouth that is in everything [animating it]. But, if our eyes were allowed to see and comprehend the chiut and spiritual energy (ruchaniut) that is flowing into each created thing from the Divine mouth and breath, the physicality and substantiality of the creation would not be apparent at all to one’s eyes, but would rather be completely nullified in relation to the chiut and ruchaniut within it… (Shaar HaYichud V’ha’emunah, Chap. 3) 

R. Shneur Zalman is teaching us that if the veils of seemingly solid material reality were pulled back, the separate-seeming individuality of a created thing would completely recede (“be nullified/batel b’mitziut, in his words) and only the flowing chiut and ruchaniut would be "seen." Now, aside from the striking way R. Shneur Zalman’s idea prefigures the view of quantum mechanics that matter is energy, his statement seems extremely important for our discussion, because it implies that by practicing qigung and cultivating an ability to sensitize ourselves to chiut, one is experientially actualizing his teaching. One may not be physically "seeing" the chiut, but one is certainly feeling it. It would seem that Chabad should begin teaching qigung to make the ideas of the Tanya more alive! 

Scholars Zhang Yu Huan and Ken Rose, authors of A Brief History of Qi, believe that the original meaning of the character for "chi" was "cloud chi," "that is, the rising vapors that gather to form the clouds." Amazingly, they date this meaning of chi back to before 1066 B.C.E.!  Hundreds of years later, especially in Daoist writings, they explain that the character evolved to express the meaning of “breath."  Therefore, it may be that ruach or ruchaniyut is a better Jewish mystical correlate to chi, since the word ruach retains the breath/vapor connection that is so clear in the quote from the Tanya. 

In light of all this, as my teacher Rabbi Miles Krassen pointed out to me in conversation, it’s important to recognize the limitations of qigung and chiut cultivation as a practice. Qigung practice is generally working with the subtle energy body, not the deeper levels of consciousness. To put it in Jewish Four Worlds mystical language, chiut cultivation is working with the subtler levels of the world of Assiyah, but we must remember there are at least three other worlds (Yetzirah, Briah, and Atzilut) to include as well! 

It is important to have a model for the multi-faceted way that the Divine Light unfolds; chiut practice is just a part of the picture.  Most qigung practice does not take one beyond the layers of ego, unlike the Hasidic practices of developing daat (experiential God awareness) or bitul ha'yesh (making the ego transparent to Divine Light). Indeed, in the Meor Eynaim text I quoted above, he suggests the practice of connecting to chiut as vital energy if one has fallen from higher levels of contemplation.
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The importance of qigung/chiut practice is that it gives experiential sense of an important element of the Hasidic/Kabbalistic emanationist view. This is important, because Hasidic texts hardly ever give practice instructions for experiencing chiut. Further, in the case of most liberal Jews, whose concepts of God (to the degree they exist) are almost entirely intellectual in nature, having a means of experiencing Divine vital energy flowing through the world is no small thing. For Jewish theology to become less heavily intellectualized and more directly experienced, qigung/chiut practice can be of great help.