Both Confucianism and Taoism consider using Xin as the noblest way to become a human being, they argued that there is no such thing as evil or poor, but rather the missing of Xin (Humanistic). Accordingly, building Xin is the oriental way of Individualization.
Awareness and Poetry
Christopher Bollas (2014) had compared the oriental mind and the western psyche. He claimed that what oriental pursuing is numinous awareness. He further stated that Zen had provided a supplement for Confucianism theories, the lack of cultivating Xin would lead to chaotic minds and destructive actions. Hence, the enemy is inside Xin, so is psychotherapy. The Chinese medicine recommends that a person be treated systemically.
The same idea had been claimed by Carl Jung, he suggested that a psychotherapist is a rain collector, by bring the harmonious to the system is what the therapist shall attempt. Jung argued that the problem is not about ask for the Sun or the rain, it is the inner environment that lost balance, what the rain collector did is synchronize the balanced inner world, and the human body could operate by itself.
Bollas (2014) enhanced that the oriental mind is maternally ordered, and the western mind is paternally ordered; he sustained his idea by pointing out that the oriental mind is a farmer who focuses on metaphor, and the western mind is a sailor who seek to surpass. I agree with Bollas that oriental language and mind are about tale its own tale. Communication came before language expression. It lays in the unconscious interaction between the mother and the infant. Winnicott claimed that there is maternal element in each of us, it was formed prelingually. Not like the western mind needs a clear, sharply, ordered definition.
I would like to use Chinese poetry as a window to the oriental heart. Chiang (1998) described in his novel, ‘the heptapods were using a nonlinear system of orthography that qualified as true writing’; ‘Their script isn’t word divided; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. They join the logograms by rotating and modifying them’. If one uses a calligraphy brush pen to write ancient poetry, one might have almost the same feeling as the novel described.
Instead of writing, the Chinese is drawing the picture of a cluster of ideas, every single character has its own meaning, thus each character can be viewed as a poem itself. There is no certain linear order in poetry, each line can be an independent image. If we see each and every person as a poem, thus every poem is the sound of the individual.
