On Saturday, April 27, people from all around the planet will meet to meditate and practice mind-body exercises, seeking health, peace and community. Organizers say the activities expand across six continents, more than 80 nations and hundreds of cities. This does not include the individuals at home who will answer the 10 a.m. local-time call to stop, breathe mindfully, and meditate.
World Tai Chi & Qigong Day has convened on the last Saturday of April for 25 years, since it was launched on the lawn of the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City by Bill Douglas and his wife, Angela Wong Douglas, in 1999. I attended a Taoist meditation class that Bill taught at the University of Kansas Medical Center in 2016, and visited him and Angela in their home. That six-state journey to find “new dharma bums” teaching Tai Chi and Qigong started in Kansas for a reason: Bill Douglas was leading the charge to spread the good news about the internal martial arts.
Today, Douglas is even more certain of his goals, and the conviction that this global event is making a difference for individuals and the world in general. In fact, he has marshaled scientific research to prove it in his latest book, the second edition of The Gospel of Science. His evangelical fervor and positivity has helped draw many like-minded wellness and spiritual groups, reviving the spirit of the 1987 Harmonic Convergence, the first multinational, simultaneous meditation event devoted to world peace.
In a world seemingly gone to hell with plagues of war, famine and poverty, it’s easy to dismiss this movement as far-out wellness gurus and woo-woo spiritualists hallucinating, but when so many people of diverse cultural backgrounds are connecting with a universal vibe of peace, you want to understand it. Douglas believes that this global movement is heralding a new era for humankind, when more people will turn to meditative and internal energy practices to heal their bodies, minds and relationships.
“This global wave of goodwill provides a vision of hope and healing to a world hungry for such visions,” Douglas writes for his opening statement on Saturday. “We are all connected by the field of life energy that physicists are now discovering permeates all existence. By immersing ourselves in the field of life energy again and again, we become more and more grounded in the absolute reality that we are all connected, all part of the web of life.”
Among those connected to the global movement is Mohamed Essa, an Egyptian “life coach” trained in Chinese medicine and BioEnergy, certified as a “pranic teacher,” and a wushu martial arts champion. Essa, joining a recent World Tai Chi & Qigong Day planning session via Zoom, told other organizers that the most important aspect of the annual event for him and others in the war-torn Middle East, is that it is a global community.
“I have seen, in my studies, how the Chinese and the Egyptian teachings are similar, how much we are all the same,” Essa said. “It is important for us that people share a community, no matter the religion or place.”
Expanding the community for Douglas has meant sharing with academic institutions, including universities in China, which already were promoting Tai Chi and Qigong through international wushu organizations. Wushu is the state-approved internal martial art form, which will make its Olympic debut this year. China, which funds Chinese cultural study programs on U.S. campuses through its Confucius Institute, has provided research and resources to support the annual global meditation events. Around the world, internal energy work is seen as a healing resource that can benefit everyone.
The World Tai Chi & Qigong website directs visitors to links reporting on scientific research showing how the meditative arts reduce stress and high blood pressure, and can treat depression and PTSD. Evidence of the health benefits are abundantly clear through years of testing, a basic argument of the Global Transformation Project, a campaign that Douglas is spearheading to convince educators to support “Mind Body Education” in public schools, including a petition for a United Nations Resolution supporting internal energy arts in schools.
In his Gospel of Science, Douglas credits research by Roger Nelson, Ph.D., of Princeton University’s Global Consciousness Project for showing the effectiveness of this new global harmony movement, using a vast computer network to measure the effects of special states of group consciousness around the world. While globally experienced moments of tragedy and sorrow are reflected in the data, it was not nearly as significant as that of globally organized events focused on compassion and healing, Douglas writes. “Those affected their global computer network even more powerfully than larger catalyzing events of fear/sorrow.”
Dr. Nelson is quoted, saying the evidence showing compassion as the most powerful emotion is “my favorite finding in the whole process of looking at the data of the Global Consciousness Project.” After a “comprehensive analysis of ‘Global Harmony’ events,” Nelson writes, “our data suggests a big change in the mass consciousness as the Tai Chi practice comes to the West.”
Douglas has seized on this supposition, and studies that suggest meditation practices over time can reduce the crime rate, and can even affect genetic development, offering “advantageous mutations” to pass along to future generations. This search for data to prove what he believes may be the antithesis of the scientific method, but it is Bill Douglas’s Gospel of Science. He writes:
“Brain changes that meditation produces, such as an increase in the compassion center of the brain … may literally result in a major evolution in the nature of humankind. The statistical data showing the world is less violent and crime is decreasing may be evidence that this physical neurological evolution is resulting in what many would think of as a spiritual awakening, truly realizing what the prophets of the major religions envisioned 2,000 years ago with their blueprints for a world of compassion.”
Is the world ready for this leap of faith?
The 602-page Gospel of Science, with another hundred pages of appendices including a work/play book of exercises, is chockful of useful information, as well as some proclamations you’ll want to fact check. It is essentially the story of Bill Douglas’s intentional journey to teach and organize a sacred quest for good health and spiritual enlightenment. It is the voice of a guru seeking other gurus to join hands and raise human consciousness to a new dimension.
The Kindle edition of the book is being offered free of charge on Sunday, April 29, the day after World Tai-Chi and Qigong Day.
I'd like to know what you think. Please reply …