1.3 Flows and Genki's Innate Use
We've seen the world at large through the lens of genki; demonstrating how all life has genki in different strengths and signatures, and genki itself appears not to interact with the world around it. How to see the world yourself in this manner will be covered in the next chapter, but for the moment we will continue to focus on the nature of genki. To do so I'll be using this sketch of my daughter Pan and a rather reluctant assistant. Bunny is a "wild" rabbit from the Capsule Corporation grounds that we are very sure has ancestors that include a pair of rabbits that escaped from Capsule Corp's atrium many years ago (the colouration gives him away). The sketch is nowhere near as good as Pan's in the preface of course, but I hope it will suffice for our demonstration.
[ Figure 1 ]
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Pan and Bunny in the visible and Pan and Bunny in ki. Their unique ki signatures are represented with different colours.
The second image is the same but in ki. Over the next few sections I'll be breaking this down into its components. For now, let's focus on the overview. Genki appears to exist everywhere throughout the body, creating a silhouette of both Pan and Bunny. The transparent nature of genki means that where a life form is thicker - Pan's thigh compared to arms for example, the ki signature appears denser as we "look" through it. Genki also appears denser within the torso, in part due to this thickness but also due to a greater concentration of genki in general. Pan's aura is present here, too, as genki leaving her body and tapering outward. Pan's natural ability and intensive training in ki-use has increased her base power, her resting energy, somewhat higher than non-ki users by a factor of a few hundred or so, and her aura extending outward four or five times further naturally than other people's. I asked her to suppress her power here to mimic a non-ki user. This is roughly how your own genki would appear.
You'll notice Pan's torso is especially bright with ki, with other colours coming into play, indicating the increased density of genki. This is not coincidental. Genki is generated in the body's centre and approximately radiates away, the density falling faster than an inverse square. What and exactly where this centre is anchored remains a mystery. It cannot be attributed to any organ in particular. The fuzzy shape of the centre is only directly detectable by its owner, only the impression of genki outside the centre is. From here it appears Pan's centre sits in the lower half of her torso (as do most people's) and the increased density appears to flow up the chest and into the head.
Why the torso? There are two things that differentiate the human body from genki-less rocks. The first is flow. The body is full of flow. Blood flows around the body pumped by the heart in a circulatory fashion. The lymphatic system in part removes toxins from tissue. The digestive system breaks down food and passes nutrients to the blood. We also breathe, allowing oxygen to be brought into and carbon dioxide to pass out of the blood. Breath and ki therefore were were traditionally linked for good reason. It's not breath that directly drives the creation of genki within the body, but breath is just one of the flows that genki governs. Genki has its own meandering circulation around the body but it does broadly map onto these physical flows. The density of genki in the torso then reflects where the processing of many of these flows take place, and that is the most advantageous place for genki to be generated.
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A rough representation of the flows within blood, the lymphatic system, breath and the alimentary canal within the upper body.
A separate philosophy of energy flow around the body exists that appears to follow this image, the concept of chakra. These are centres of spiritual energy management within the body that appear to start at the base of the spine and extend up through to the crown of the head. They represent different needs and emotions in the body, and physical illness and emotional distress play off each other through these chakra. It's true that emotions will register in different parts of the body. Anxiety manifests as an upturned stomach, embarrassment with a flushed face. And genki does seem to follow the centre of the body up through to the head where these chakra would be located. In truth, genki is more following blood flow to the head and is not governed in a number of well-defined different centres. Still, as we shall see, moving genki around the body is important and can trigger different effects, some of which map well onto the idea of chakra activation, thus this philosophy could be a useful visualisation tool.
Not all flow in the world has genki - wind and water does not intrinsically carry it. What then, is particular about the flows of life? It is the complex interplay of these systems relying on the correct functioning of this flow that necessitates the existence of genki.
For a skin cell in your fingertip to function it requires a number of systems to be in perfect balance. There must be the correct supply of oxygen from the breath and glucose from food transported by blood. The cell needs to dispose of waste like carbon dioxide and water generated in the respiration process. Other molecules like proteins are needed to replace damaged parts of the cell. Cells that die, or viruses and bacteria nearby to this skin cell need to be identified and removed. The pH, the measure of acidity or alkalinity in the cell, needs to be maintained. The cell's temperature needs to be in a narrow range, too. The body's ability to seek this equilibrium is known as "homeostasis".
It is no mean feat for the body to maintain homeostatic equilibrium. During my PhD I was able to formulate a model for a number of these processes. Whilst I will spare you the mathematical details I shall broadly explain the concepts behind these models. They require the body to measure it's current state - let's say temperature - then have an ideal temperature it is trying to maintain.
A measurement means nothing without an uncertainty attached. You need to know both the quantity of something and the precision of your measurement for it to have any meaning. In the case of taking your temperature with a thermometer, you can record the temperature but unless you know how good your thermometer is it is useless. Say for example I know normal body temperature is 37.0C and a fever is a temperature of above 37.5C. I'm not feeling well so I take my temperature and the thermometer says 40C. Am I sick? You may say yes, after all, 40C much higher than 37.5C. But we haven't considered the accuracy of the thermometer yet. A standard thermometer has an accuracy of plus/minus 0.1C. If I was using this thermometer then yes I am very sick indeed and should probably go to the hospital!
But what if I told you I'd made the thermometer myself very badly and its accuracy was rounded to the nearest 10C? That means my temperature could be anywhere between 35C and 45C. With that knowledge then, we don't have enough information to determine whether I have a fever or not or whether I should go to the hospital.
The body is constantly performing measurements on itself to determine its current temperature. The body also knows that its own internal thermometer has a precision associated with it. The body also has an ideal temperature it needs to be at to operate efficiently and a range of acceptable values. For each measurement then the body needs to assess whether its temperature has moved outside of the acceptable range and, if so, what action to take action to remedy that. How much action the body takes and how drastic that is is determined by how far away these two measurements are from each other.
There's a set of mathematical formulae that govern this process of observation, comparison to expectation and updating. It's called Bayesian statistics and there are plenty of processes in the body that we can explain using this branch of probability theory. Let's run through an example of how this updating works and, despite the odd name and terminology, it's just a mathematician's convoluted way of describing common sense.
Let's say you have a belief. An apt example to pick given the subject matter would be "people can't fly". Now, your belief has a value (the statement "people can't fly") and it has an associated precision - in this case a high precision. That is, you are really, reallysure people can't fly. This belief is known as your prior belief, or just the prior. It is what you knew before a new observation.
[ Figure 3 ]
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Now, you go into the bookstore and find this book, a book saying people can learn to fly. This is your observation, your new data to take into account. No observation is complete without an associated precision, so what is it? Well, that's up to you to decide, but in this case if the book just says "people can fly" with very little evidence, I'd forgive you for saying this observation had a low precision. The book might be right, but it probably isn't.
How likely is this book's statement to be true? You need to compare your prior and the observation and if you think the new information is likely to be correct your beliefs will change a lot. If it's not likely to be correct you beliefs will only change a little. This is called updating your prior. In this case you don't think the book's statement is likely so your prior does not move much. But reading this book, whilst you didn't believe people could fly and still don't, has planted a seed of doubt. You didn't put much stock in this claim, but it's still there, folded in with all the evidence that says people can't fly. And it affects the precision of your prior belief ever so much, the precision is ever so marginally lower (the curve in the figure is wider).
[ Figure 4 ]
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What if I was to show you some harder evidence? Say, I came to your house and showed you I could fly. I'm expressing exactly the same point as before - "people can fly" - but now the evidence I'm presenting is a lot stronger. It is convincing, you think to yourself, but this could be special effects like in the Cell Games all those years ago. The precision you assign to this new observation "people can fly" is far higher than the one you assigned to the book. We've made an observation so we should update our beliefs. Let's compare to our current prior belief, "people can't fly". The precisions are similar now, so when combining them the new observation has a very strong effect when creating the new prior, the updated belief, and the new belief has a very low precision. In one fell swoop you've gone from "I definitely don't believe people can fly" to "I'm really not sure about anything anymore".
[ Figure 5 ]
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I'm quite a tenacious person so I'll give it one more shot. Let's say I now take you out for a flight. Now you know it's really not a magic trick, people really can fly. Again it's the same observation "people can fly" but there is no doubt about it, this observation has a very high precision. And what do we do? We compare it to our prior again. Our prior has a very low precision because we weren't sure at all of the truth anymore. But this new evidence is so strong it pulls the updated prior to the point your belief has finally changed, with a high precision on "people can fly".
This constant updating is how we learn about the world around us. I have missed out one component though, and that is the element of surprise. When comparing your prior and new observations sometimes, like above, we find the new observations don't mesh with our current beliefs. We experience surprise at this - that is the actual science term, by the way! Life forms hate surprise. We spend most of our time trying to minimise it. You might like the odd surprise in life like gifts or a good mystery book but surprise on a fundamental level we do not - we actively avoid dangerous situations for example.
One way to avoid surprise is to learn from new information, so next time you make the same observation you are a little less surprised. Above is the way I would hope our conversation would go, learning with each surprise, ending with you eventually believing me. The way I wouldn't want you to minimise surprise would be to attribute so little precision to a new observation (placing so much doubt on the new piece of information) it can be ignored. If you've ever tried to argue with a conspiracy theorist you'll know they will explain away any evidence you give them so they don't have to learn from it or change their beliefs. Oh, speaking of, the special effects at the Cell Games I mentioned earlier? Mr Satan did indeed lie. The Cell Games were all real. Our apologies for the deception, you deserve a fuller explanation which will be given later - although, how's the update to your "magic tricks at the Cell Games" prior coming along?
The last way to minimise surprise would be to change something about you or your environment so the observation didn't happen again. If you were surprised to see a dangerous lion, rather than ignoring it or just learning that lions are part of daily life now, you'd climb out of the zoo exhibit. In the case of this book you might put this book down so it doesn't challenge your preconceptions anymore. In terms of homeostasis, this last option is what the body does, changing part of the system to bring the next observation closer to the prior.
[ Figure 6 a,b ]
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Back to the body maintaining temperature, let's reframe the idea in this prior/observation/surprise format. The body has a prior belief on the temperature it should be. That temperature has a very limited possible range, the prior has a very high precision. Now, when the body makes an observation, that observation also has as very high precision (it has to be otherwise the body wouldn't be able to act). When the new temperature differs greatly from the expected prior, the body experiences "surprise". The bigger the difference, the greater the surprise. It takes action. For a small hot surprise, maybe the body starts to sweat. For a large hot surprise, you'll drop the mug with boiling water. The body will keep taking action until it cannot tell whether the observed temperature is different from it's prior.
One can find chemical and hormonal triggers throughout the body as well as regions in the brain that enable these large scale processes to take place. Body temperature is regulated by an almond-sized region of the brain called the hypothalamus, for example. But there is another element to this that troubled me for years, however, and that was how the body remained in true synchronicity. Not only are these systems regulated at whole-body scales but at the cellular level, too. What maintains these prior beliefs, preventing them from drifting? What triggers responses where simple chemical reactions cannot explain the synchronicity?
It is not just immediate responses. The body is able to subconsciously compensate when it cannot reach true homeostasis - for example staving off becoming dangerously dehydrated by sweating too much. The ability to prioritise these systems is known allostasis. Even further, we can anticipate the future and prepare ourselves accordingly by putting on jumpers when we know outside will be cold, to automatically bracing for impact when we jump from a high place. What governs all this?
My answer to these questions is genki. Genki carries sometimes extremely complex information and subtle instruction around the body, including within the brain. This is known as the genki's intent. It is able to affect necessary change across the body, including preemptively modifying priors in anticipation of events. Therefore sentience, in particular the ability to plan for the future, is more than just the physical brain but encompasses genki, too.
Genki may be generated in the abdomen but its intent is still chosen with the brain's assistance. The vagus nerve, travelling from the brain all the way through the torso and branching out to the major organs, carries feedback to the brain about the body's homeostatic status and sends back commands. It is no accident that this nerve travels through the densest region of genki. Intent can propagate through genki instantaneously so a nerve is not necessary, but this shows all these systems developed simultaneously.
It's the ability for genki to carry subconscious intent, the intent to check the body's status and carry out the allostatic process that makes genki so important. Genki allows for higher level communication across the body and allows a measured response - whether that's explosively in a fight-or-flight situation, or slowly due to changes in hormones needed on a daily cycle. But that intent can be consciously manipulated - even completely hijacked - to produce the "superpowers" my family, friends and I appear to have.
Whilst there are physical systems in place that perform allostasis, genki is definitely necessary for the body. The body /can/ do without genki for a while but the body registers the lack of it very quickly, panicking without it in a manner akin to the experience of hypothermia. This rising panic is very obviously felt when suppressing ki output to zero. I have done no concrete experiments on how long the body can function without genki, to do so I feel would be unethical. However, my father, Son Goku, did on more than one occasion abuse his ki-use abilities beyond what was safe and ruined his control of ki for a time.
He developed Delayed Onset Ki Disorder and he made for an interesting case study. Whilst he was able to sense ki correctly, the ability to sense and control his own genki was completely out of kilter. He was unable to draw greater power correctly, reducing power-level. This extended somewhat to the subconscious, where genki was unable to control exactly the body's response to changes in status, and allostasis was thrown out of control. The subconscious symptoms were intermittent and a subtle effect for him thankfully, but further abuse would have rendered this problem permanent and even possibly killed him if he was unable to regain control of allostasis. At times he even developed what I could only call hot and cold flushes as his body did not respond correctly to observations of temperature. His appetite even dropped in response, not needing to eat to replace the genki his body wasn't using to maintain homeostasis. Rest fixed the issue, the genki system being far more resilient than other systems within the body, taking a few days to a week to recover. But it was a strong warning sign not to push ki-use beyond what his body was capable of coping with and he learnt… eventually.
Genki then exists within all areas of the body. It travels along the naturally existing flows within the body including the flow we have direct conscious control over, the breath, hence the breath's importance in genki manipulation. Genki has an evolutionary function, primarily to maintain homeostasis. This is keeping the environment within the body at optimal levels for functioning, for example temperature, acidity and oxygen levels. The body has what is known as a prior on these values, an idealised optimum value and an allowed range. When the measurement of those values within the body differ greatly to this prior, the so-called surprise experienced causes the body to respond to correct this. This correction is mediated through genki. Genki is also able to balance and prioritise multiple systems under homeostatic control, known as allostasis, and it can forward-plan, anticipating future needs and preparing the body. Genki therefore is entwined with sentience. Without genki, homeostasis and the ability to forward plan would eventually break down, causing internal processes to fall out of balance across the body. Genki's ability to carry information and commands - intent - is what makes genki so potent and useful for us beyond maintaining homeostasis.
Still with me? Don't fret, one doesn't need to understand the ins-and-outs of genki to manipulate it, but it does help. I will now be breaking down the pictures above into their components, discussing centres as generators of ki, then the use of aura.