10,000 Years of Strangeness: A Paranormal Primer for Ancient and Modern China

Part III: Mysteries and Legends

Chapter 10: A Call from the Forest—来自森林的呼唤

Dedicated to @clif, a guy who relishes the unknown

Previous Chapters 前章: Part 1: Chapter 1, Ch 2, Ch 3, Ch 4, Ch 5-1, Ch 5-2, Ch 5-3, Ch. 6

Previous Chapters 前章: Part 2: Chapter 7, Ch 8-1, Ch 8-2, Ch 8-3, Ch 8-4, Ch 8-5, Ch 9

(This chapter was originally published as a stand-alone article in YICT Container Terminal Magazine, or something like that. It's been a long time.)

The following experience happened one Saturday morning while in the woods at Mt. Bijia Park (笔架山公园) near Shenzhen Youth College, previously described. A few days earlier, I had discovered this power spot for birds. It's along a foot trail up the mountain where a few different habitats merge. The travels and habits of a number of different species converge here and I decided to check it out more thoroughly this particular Saturday morning. It’s a kind of ley line intersection for birds.

A variety of habitats converge in Mt. Bijia Park: water, field, and woodland

One reason I returned to this spot was that I thought I glimpsed an orange-bellied leafbird (橙腹叶鹎) there the previous week. It is one of the most colorful local birds and a real gem of the forest. Spotting and communing with these things really takes you into a deeper relationship with "place." Birds connect our inner qi (气) with the outer qi.

Orange-bellied leafbird

Somehow they link our microcosm (小宇宙) with the macrocosm (宏观世界). Their songs, when listened to receptively, help reshape our jing (精) and align it with the external jing, or essence of the place (地方精??). This is why bird language and concentric rings were so important to the Native Americans, and other primitive cultures around the world. It is how we communicate with nature, just as alchemical cultivation enables us to communicate with nature.

Doing qigong (气功) and its associated practices develop a language and mechanism for uniting with the universe and understanding its language. Birds do the same thing. But you must be in a deeper state than ordinary in order to fully appreciate and understand them--inner quiet, a silent monkey mind. Thus the time we spend doing qigong and the time we spend quietly in nature, we learn to communicate with the macrocosm.

So I was just off this trail trying to spot some birds I heard moving in the brush. So far in this one little area I’d seen laughingthrushes (噪鹛), coucals (鸦鹃), thrushes (鸫), possibly a leafbird (叶鹎), bulbuls (鹎属), and magpies (鹊).

Masked laughingthrush

Greater Coucal

Grey-backed Thrush

The whole thing started with the bulbuls. These birds represent transition or transformation. Their song invites you to change, to adapt to new surroundings, to seek further within and without yourself, a shift. I think specifically it was the red-whiskered bulbul (红耳鹎) that invited me in. This had been going on for over week as I got to know them.

Red-whiskered bulbul

That Saturday morning, I was sitting quietly and still well off the trail. I remember my teacher back home, Tom Brown, saying you must get into the trailless woods to know what secrets the forest has to teach. He kept emphasizing it: “The traaaiiilllless woods!” He would drag it out.

Then I heard the single loud note of the red-billed blue magpie (红嘴蓝鹊) strike like lightening in the forest and a flash of “opening up” struck like a baseball bat, and there was a rattling call to awareness. I sat with this for a while and watched the magpies.

Red-billed blue magpie

I moved again to the trail because I heard a lot of activity over there. I stood still for a while letting the birds relax into my presence as I relaxed into theirs. As I stood peering into the brush searching for a thrush I heard, WHAM! A loud, taunting song erupted from behind me. It was deep and resonant, eerie in its voice, even terrifying. I don’t scare easily in the woods and have even slept in the open around bears and mountain lions, but this song shook me to my core. At first I thought someone was trying to play a joke on me and looked for the trickster to appear.

Woop woop woop! Woop woop woop woop! Woop woop woop! (无无无！无无无无！无无无!)

As we will see momentarily, the Chinese rendition of the sound is so much more apropos than the English, for the sound, rendered in Chinese, means “without”, “none”, “nothingness.”

It was a single note that harmonized with everything and created the sort of earth-shattering and re-creative force of the choral movement from Beethoven's 9th Symphony. Yet it exceeded that in simplicity by degrees beyond imagination. Thus, the reality of it was that much more astonishing.

Then it stopped. I scanned the forest edges for possible candidates but saw nothing.

A little while later it started up again, this time in front of me further up the slope. And the answer to it came from behind me. What magic creature makes this noise? I had to find out. I moved off the trail and into the forest slowly. Stopped. Listened again. It was in the same place. I moved a little more and stopped again. Still in the same place. I repeated this and kept hearing the song in the same place. Yet I was not in a position to look for the singer yet. I moved further and stopped again. This time the songster had moved on. Still within range, but I’d exceeded his safe-distance.

Woop woop woop! Woop woop woop woop! Woop woop woop! (无无无！无无无无！无无无!)

I took a seat and kept still, listening. He and his friend across the way were talking to each other, or to me. Or perhaps both. I waited. And waited. And waited. They never came closer. I could hear the morning exercisers on the trail, some shouting and singing.

See, there's these hollerers here. Whenever they hike in the mountains they stop every few minutes and let out a good holler. I don't know where the custom comes from, but it's here. And it's damned annoying. In the distance there is actually a romantic quality to it, as in the old sense of the word, not the candlelight dinner sense of the word. But as they get closer and you hear how loud it really is, it loses all appeal and you realize there’s a giant ego pounding the trail completely unaware of its environment just waiting for the next moment to announce its presence to everyone within earshot whether they care or not.

I tried to move in on the bird again because the hollerers were coming my way. I just couldn't get close enough. I'm sure the bird read my anxiety and kept its distance. Had I been able to relax more deeply and penetrate the inner silence further, the alpha state, it would've waited for me, because that's what birds do.

I realized, this bird, with its terrifyingly taunting woop woop woop (无无无) had an important message for me: He was inviting me into the unknown. That is exactly it. He was inviting, and at the same time, daring me, to enter the unknown. That was the job of this bird. And anyone who went slowly enough and listened enough, would get it.

But what was this unknown he was inviting me into? Was it something with my relationship? Was it a lifestyle change? Was it the awesome and mysterious Wuji (无极)? What was it?

The irony of this line of questioning didn't hit me at the time, but it's obvious now. The unknown is the unknown, and it will remain unknown until you get there. You can see where it is and walk towards it, but you don’t know what it is until you get there.

I was hoping the bird had a more precise answer for me, but he just kept taunting me from the bushes. It made me feel rather like the man toiling on the burning road in the Stephen Crane poem. "But the ass only grinned at him from the green place."

At last the hollerers were right upon me, yelling whatever it is they yell, and the birds fell silent. Perhaps these hollerers were trying to scare off the unknown. Perhaps they were afraid of the unknown and their shouting was some way of concealing their consuming fear of what lay ahead. Perhaps they just wished to be left alone by whatever mysteries were out there.

I came home still shaken by the experience and wondering where I would enter the unknown and how. Which direction would I take? Or would I be shown? That bird call had something to do with the infinite wonder of the core space. The infinite power and mystery that is there may or may not have anything to do with qigong, it just is. And it’s waiting to be discovered.

Over the last couple of days after that experience, I had realized that the whole alchemical process is a journey into the unknown. It's about transformation. Sure you "know" the formulas or "know" the practices. But you don't know what changes they'll bring in you. You don't know how they're going to reshape your jing(精), qi(气), or shen(神). You don't know where you're going to end up or even where your next step will land. Is this what Tian Liyang up on Wudang Mountain meant by “it’s all bullshit?”

Unless you let go of the "known," you will never find the unknown. It's hidden. In the forest. And thus is superior to the path, which is just another way of saying Dao (道).

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