Qigong deviation—the dark side of Qigong practices

“Wang was a retired worker at a biscuit factory.  He had always suffered from free floating anxiety.  During the 80’s, he started to learn a form of qigong that stresses on spontaneous movement.  He started to practice with a small group in the People’s Park in Beijing.  Initially, he achieved great health and mental benefits.  Qigong released his high anxiety and he became very peaceful.

However, after a volatile argument with his wife, he tried to use qigong to calm his anger but instead the spontaneous qigong movements overtake him and he started to do somersaults continuously for over five hours.  Totally exhausted he collapsed and vomited.  From that day on, his body would suddenly move and shakes uncontrollably even when he was not practicing qigong.

His wife tried several qigong masters to intercept this violent qi with no result.  By the time she committed him in the Beijing psychiatric clinic, Wang had started to hear voices in his head that he told others they are comminutes from extra-terrestrials, ET.  He was diagnosed as schizophrenia.

Similar cases have been reported by a medical anthropologist, Nancy Chen, Breathing Spaces, qigong, psychiatry, and healing in China, Columbia University press, (2003).

What is qigong deviation?  This is a transliteration of the negative, mental disturbance of qigong practice.  The classical term is zhuhuo rumo, inner fire gone astray and entering the realm of Mara.  This term is a specific qigong and meditation label for patients who show sign of mental and physical illness.
There are several factors that contribute to qigong deviation:
 

• One, the practitioner’s intrinsic psychological profile can make he or she especially prone to deviation.  For example, a schizophrenic will hear voices in qigong practice and comes to believe that he or she could heal people with qi.

• Two, most qigong deviation comes from qi phenomenon:  visions, voices, and internal sensation of heat.  In most cases, they are manifestation of pathology, or sickness releasing—if one clings onto those extraordinary effects too tightly, they would grow excessive and turn into qigong deviation.  Then a natural manifestation becomes psychotic and overwhelms the person’s mental self.  Hence, the term subscribes such state as entering the realm of Mara, the demonic possession.

• Three, subliminal suggestion and past conditionings arises from one’s own ethnic and cultural background.  In china, vision of Kuan Yin, Buddha and other gods are common form of qi deviation.  In the western world, vision of the Virgin Mary, Jesus and other saints are common to many devotee of the Christian faith.  When a qigong practitioners take their subliminal suggestive mirage as real effect of qi emanation, a feedback loop increases such delusory phenomenon until they started to take over the individual psyche.

The dark side of qigong deviation is the undercurrent of danger in the wake of qigong in America.  The wave of mass hysteria induced by qigong had crashed in China, resulting in the arrest and imprisonment of thousands of innocent qigong practitioners and several qigong con artists.  The mass hysteria of several thousands of people paying a week’s wages to attend lectures by qigong master no longer exist in China—due to state banning large group gatherings and debunking several qigong charlatans’ tricks and gimmicks:  distant healing, group qi projection, making things disappear.

These, indeed, are ominous signs, as many of those charlatans have move out of China into other regions.  America is fertile soil ripe for their exploitation.
As the lasting advice of the Buddha
“Do not trust a teacher because the claim of authority,
Trust in your own experience when you find them to be true.”

The practice of qigong has to be within its natural framework of Daoism: simplicity, natural and ordinary.  The moment one pursuits the extraordinary, one has already taken a step toward self delusion.