was empty heat not insomnia

[Guest guest]

I apologize for this being a little unformed, I've been thinking about this

lately but it hasn't quite gelled yet:

 

I think there is a habit of using astringent medicinals for shen/hun/po issues

without attributing the action of directly astringing the spirit, but rather

fobbing off the function on astringing blood or fluids to nourish the ground of

the spirit. I would argue that calming the mind and settling the spirit are more

often functions of astringing the spirit, at least in older texts (I think we

are still up against the mind body duality and refuse to acknowledge shen as a

physical, if rarified, substance). Grasping functions are related to qi and

yang, while ballast is a function of the " mass " of yin. When yin is vacuous then

yang is not well grounded and rises. When yang/qi fails yang breaks away because

it cannot hold, the grasp becomes too weak, and in that case the shen/hun/po

would be " let go " by its storing viscera. My understanding is that this is the

nature of the old diagnosis of " floating corpse " or problematic talking to the

dead, which is seen when the body becomes weak enough to fail to restrain the

po. When liberated the po tends to wander about and chat up other yin (evil,

dead) spirits, which are typically hungry for essence, triggering either sexual

dreams, or leading the person into a seductive dream world while their body

withers. Daoists made a point of restraining the po in the body in meditation,

as it is seen inspiring bodily desires, even the movement of the hun was to be

regulated in sleep so more orthodox and useful dreams were had.

 

Proper sleep and dreaming requires the shen to be submerged in its substrate of

blood ( " the shen rests and the hun and po fly up " is the traditional description

of the dreaming state), but it must also be contained by the appropriate qi (as

with the blood itself, which might indicate an aspect of gui pi tang's fairly

rapid function on the heart and shen, since it boosts spleen qi, which has a

direct effect on blood containment and a possible spill over effect of

containing the shen?). The vast majority of insomnia patterns are heat related,

but what does heat do to qi, or other subtle substances? It excites them to the

point that they are no longer contained and then drives then out of their normal

functional relationships, spilling blood out of its pathway and generating wind

by driving qi off of the blood. The shen is more subtle than qi, so perhaps it

is even more prone to injury in this manner. In yang vacuity the qi of the heart

is too weak to house the shen, but because the shen is also crippled by a lack

of qi and yang, theoretically the nature of the insomnia would be different,

perhaps more listless and less edgy, there being no heat to lend the shen that

frenetic quivering quality.

 

I'm sure there's another way or two of thinking about it,

 

Par Scott, MAOM, Lic Ac

19 Belmont St

Cambridge MA 02138

617 499 2957

 

 

 

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Stephen Bonzak