The Dancing Wu Li Masters (3 page)

When I tell my friends that I study physics, they move their heads from
side to side, they shake their hands at the wrist, and they whistle, “Whew! That’s difficult.” This universal reaction to the word “physics” is a wall that stands between what physicists do and what most people think they do. There is usually a big difference between the two.

Physicists themselves are partly to blame for this sad situation. Their shop talk sounds like advanced Greek, unless you are Greek or a physicist. When they are not talking to other physicists, physicists speak English. Ask them what they do, however, and they sound like the natives of Corfu again.

On the other hand, part of the blame is ours. Generally speaking, we have given up trying to understand what physicists (and biologists, etc.) really do. In this we do ourselves a disservice. These people are engaged in extremely interesting adventures that are not that difficult to understand. True,
how
they do what they do sometimes entails a technical explanation which, if you are not an expert, can produce an involuntary deep sleep.
What
physicists do, however, is actually quite simple. They wonder what the universe is really made of, how it works, what we are doing in it, and where it is going, if it is going
anyplace at all. In short, they do the same things that we do on starry nights when we look up at the vastness of the universe and feel overwhelmed by it and a part of it at the same time. That is what physicists really do, and the clever rascals get paid for doing it.

Unfortunately, when most people think of “physics,” they think of chalkboards covered with undecipherable symbols of an unknown mathematics. The fact is that physics is not mathematics. Physics, in essence, is simple wonder at the way things are and a divine (some call it compulsive) interest in how that is so. Mathematics is the
tool
of physics. Stripped of mathematics, physics becomes pure enchantment.

I had spoken often to a friend, who was a physicist, about the possibility of writing a book, unencumbered with technicalities and mathematics, to explain the exciting insights that motivate current physics. So when he invited me to a conference on physics that he and Michael Murphy were arranging at the Esalen Institute, I accepted with a purpose.

The Esalen Institute (it is named for an Indian tribe) is in northern California. The northern California coast is an awesome combination of power and beauty, but nowhere so much as along the Pacific Coast Highway between the towns of Big Sur and San Luis Obispo. The Esalen facilities are located about a half hour south of Big Sur between the highway and the coastal mountains on the one side and rugged cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the other. A dancing stream divides the northern third of the grounds from the remainder. On that side is a big house (called the Big House) where guests stay and groups meet, along with a small home where Dick Price (co-founder of Esalen with Murphy) stays with his family. On the other side of the stream is a lodge where meals are served and meetings are held, accommodations for guests and staff, and hot sulfur baths.

Dinner at Esalen is a multidimensional experience. The elements are candlelight, organic food, and a contagious naturalness that is the essence of the Esalen experience. I joined two men who already were eating. One was David Finkelstein, a physicist from Yeshiva University (in New York) who was attending the conference on physics. The
other was Al Chung-liang Huang, a T’ai Chi Master who was leading a workshop at Esalen. I could not have chosen better companions.

The conversation soon turned to physics.

“When I studied physics in Taiwan,” said Huang, “we called it Wu Li (pronounced ‘Woo Lee’). It means ‘Patterns of Organic Energy.’”

Everyone at the table was taken at once by this image. Mental lights flashed on, one by one, as the idea penetrated. “Wu Li” was more than poetic. It was the best definition of physics that the conference would produce. It caught that certain something, that living quality that we were seeking to express in a book, that thing without which physics becomes sterile.

“Let’s write a book about Wu Li!” I heard myself exclaim. Immediately, ideas and energy began to flow, and in one stroke all of the prior planning that I had done went out the window. From that pooling of energy came the image of the Dancing Wu Li Masters. My remaining days at Esalen and those that followed were devoted to finding out what Wu Li Masters are, and why they dance. All of us sensed with excitement and certitude that we had discovered the channel through which the very things that we wanted to say about physics would flow.

The Chinese language does not use an alphabet like western languages. Each word in Chinese is depicted by a character, which is a line drawing. (Sometimes two or more characters are combined to form different meanings.) This is why it is difficult to translate Chinese into English. Good translations require a translator who is both a poet and a linguist.

For example, “Wu” can mean either “matter” or “energy.” “Li” is a richly poetic word. It means “universal order” or “universal law.” It also means “organic patterns.” The grain in a panel of wood is Li. The organic pattern on the surface of a leaf is also Li, and so is the texture of a rose petal. In short, Wu Li, the Chinese word for physics, means “patterns of organic energy” (“matter/energy”
[Wu] + “universal order/organic patterns” [Li]. This is remarkable since it reflects a world view which the founders of western science (Galileo and Newton) simply did not comprehend, but toward which virtually every physical theory of import in the twentieth century is pointing! The question is not, “Do they know something that we don’t?” The question is, “How do they know it?”

English words can be pronounced almost any way without changing their meanings. I was five years a college graduate before I learned to pronounce “consummate” as an adjective (con-SUM-mate). (It means “carried to the utmost extent or degree; perfect”). I live in anguish when I think of the times that I have spoken of
con
summate linguists,
con
summate scholars, etc. Someone always seemed to be holding back a smile, almost. I learned later that these were the people who read dictionaries. Nonetheless, my bad pronunciation never prevented me from being understood. That is because inflections do not change the denotation of an English word. “No” spoken with a rising inflection (“No?”), with a downward inflection (“No!”), and with no inflection (“No…”) all mean (according to the dictionary) “a denial, a refusal, negative.”

This is not so in Chinese. Most Chinese syllables can be pronounced several different ways. Each different pronunciation is a different word which is written differently and which has a meaning of its own. Therefore, the same syllable, pronounced with different inflections, which unaccustomed western listeners scarcely can distinguish, constitutes distinctly separate words, each with its own ideogram and meaning, to a Chinese listener. In English, which is an atonal language, these different ideograms are all written and pronounced the same way.

For example, there are over eighty different “Wu”s in Chinese, all of which are spelled and pronounced the same way in English. Al Huang has taken five of these “Wu”s, each of which, when combined with “Li,” produces a different “Wu Li,” each with the same English spelling, and each pronounced (in English) “Woo Lee.”

The first Wu Li means “Patterns of Organic Energy.” This is the Chinese way of saying “physics.” (Wu means “matter” or “energy”).

The second Wu Li means “My Way.” (Wu means “mine” or “self.”)

The third Wu Li means “Nonsense.” (Wu means “void” or “nonbeing.”)

The fourth Wu Li means “I Clutch My Ideas.” (Wu means “to make a fist” or “clutch with a closed hand.”)

The fifth Wu Li means “Enlightenment.” (Wu means “enlightenment” or “my heart/my mind.”)

If we were to stand behind a master weaver as he begins to work his loom, we would see, at first, not cloth, but a multitude of brightly colored threads from which he picks and chooses with his expert eye, and feeds into the moving shuttle. As we continue to watch, the threads blend one into the other, a fabric appears, and on the fabric, behold! A pattern emerges.

In a similar manner, Al Huang has created a beautiful tapestry from his own epistemological loom:

PHYSICS = WU LI

Wu Li = Patterns of Organic Energy

Wu Li = My Way

Wu Li = Nonsense

Wu Li = I Clutch My Ideas

Wu Li = Enlightenment

Each of the physicists at the conference, to a person, reported a resonance with this rich metaphor. Here, at last, was the vehicle through which we could present the seminal elements of advanced physics. By the end of the week, everyone at Esalen was talking about Wu Li.

At the same time that this was happening, I was trying to find out what a “Master” is. The dictionary was no help. All of its definitions involved an element of control. This did not fit easily into our image of the Dancing Wu Li Masters. Since Al Huang is a T’ai Chi Master, I asked him.

“That is the word that other people use to describe me,” he said. To Al Huang, Al Huang was just Al Huang.

Later in the week, I asked him the same question again, hoping to get a more tangible answer.

“A Master is someone who started before you did,” was what I got that time.

My western education left me unable to accept a nondefinition for my definition of a “Master,” so I began to read Huang’s book,
Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain
. There, in the foreword by Alan Watts, in a paragraph describing Al Huang, I found what I sought. Said Alan Watts of Al Huang:

Here was just the definition of a Master that I sought. A Master teaches essence. When the essence is perceived, he teaches what is necessary to expand the perception. The Wu Li Master does not speak of gravity until the student stands in wonder at the flower petal falling to the ground. He does not speak of laws until the student, of his own, says, “How strange! I drop two stones simultaneously, one heavy and one light, and
both
of them reach the earth at the same moment!” He does not speak of mathematics until the student says, “There must be a way to express this more simply.”

In this way, the Wu Li Master dances with his student. The Wu Li Master does not teach, but the student learns. The Wu Li Master always begins at the center, at the heart of the matter. This is the approach that we take in this book. It is written for intelligent people who want to know about advanced physics but who are ignorant of
its terminology and, perhaps, of its mathematics.
The Dancing Wu Li Masters
is a book of essence; the essence of quantum mechanics, quantum logic, special relativity, general relativity, and some new ideas that indicate the direction that physics seems to be moving. Of course, who can know where the future goes? The only surety is that what we think today will be a part of the past tomorrow. Therefore, this book deals not with knowledge, which is always past tense anyway, but with imagination, which is physics come alive, which is Wu Li.

One of the greatest physicists of all, Albert Einstein, was perhaps a Wu Li Master. In 1938 he wrote:

Most people believe that physicists are explaining the world. Some physicists even believe that, but the Wu Li Masters know that they are only dancing with it.

I asked Huang how he structures his classes.

“Every lesson is the first lesson,” he told me. “Every time we dance, we do it for the first time.”

“But surely you cannot be starting new each lesson,” I said. “Lesson number two must be built on what you taught in lesson number one, and lesson three likewise must be built on lessons one and two, and so on.”

“When I say that every lesson is the first lesson,” he replied, “it does not mean that we forget what we already know. It means that what we are doing is always new, because we are always doing
it
for the first time.”

This is another characteristic of a Master. Whatever he does, he does with the enthusiasm of doing it for the first time. This is the source of his unlimited energy. Every lesson that he teaches (or learns) is a first lesson. Every dance that he dances, he dances for the first time. It is always new, personal, and alive.

Isidor I. Rabi, Nobel Prize winner in Physics and the former Chairman of the Physics Department at Columbia University, wrote: