Rick Barrett

Rick Barrett (born 1951) teaches taijiquan and practices energy healing in New York City. He wrote Taijiquan: Through the Western Gate in response to a disturbing trend; the objectification of self and others. This trend is rooted in scientific materialism (scientism), the notion that because something can be described (even vaguely) in mechanistic terms that that idea replaces the event itself. (Just because you can graph the trajectory of a curveball doesn't mean you can hit it.) The Chinese internal martial art of taijiquan is the perfect vehicle for demonstrating the limits of this way of thinking. While its graceful movents can be crudely described in mechanistic terms, executing it that way yield none of the higher level abilities promised by the literature and lore. It requires a transrational and transpersonal approach.

Barrett won several national championships in pushing hands, a taiji exercise where you maintain your balance while uprooting your opponent. The challenge is to use as little force as possible. In triumphing against much younger, stronger, larger opponents he saw the effectiveness of energetic coherence: using consciousness to access abilities that lay dormant in a less coherent state. In Taijiquan: Through the Western Gate, Barrett grounds his understanding of arcane principles in recent scientific discoveries by James Oschman and Mae Wan Ho and the Integral Philosophy of Ken Wilber. Most important, he employs a radical empiricism to test and demonstrate the paradoxical power of authentic taijiquan, and make the esoteric a little less hidden.

Barrett continues to explore beyond the Western Gate and will be publishing a new book titled 'Finding You in a World of It' in September 2014 integrating Martin Buber, Alfred Korzybski, and Zhuangzi.