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The student asks the Zen-Master: Every morning the Sun goes up and every evening the sun goes down. This is reality, one can see it, it is the absolute truth. The Zen-Master answers: Have you ever been to the moon? If yes, you will realize, the sun is always there, no up and down.
The big difference between human beings and animals is the ability of human beings to distinguish. Differentiate between good and evil. Over thousand of years of further development, the ability to distinguish grow up to what we call today “Ego”. Ego is the phantom self that anyone believes in. Ego is a construction of thoughts in the human’s brain, no more no less, a collection of very weak electrical signals. Ego is what makes humans to believe they are detached from the rest. Most of us believe: Me and the others. Me and my life. There is no “me” and no “my life”. There is one life and this is the totality of all beings. There is no “me” and no “others”, there is only one big “one”, the universe. Yet, every human being is a universe on its own. A single being is nothing and everything at the same time. This is the principal of polarity, the principal of Yin & Yang, this is Tai Chi.
Because most human beings are lost in their thoughts, they lost connection to the totality. They lost connection to their own body, to nature. Tai Chi is the way back to nature, the way out of senseless, uncontrolled, endless thinking. Out of the thinking noise that human brain produces. Out of Ego, out of the Idea, “here I am and there are the others”. The way how this happens is very simple in fact. By taking the attention out of the thinking process and be aware of your body. The more one senses his/her body, the less thoughts are produced, the more one senses how everything connects to each other. Even one deep conscious breath may be enough to sense the holiness of being. Of course, the mind is a very good instrument. No mind, no Tai Chi. Animals can’t practice Tai Chi (they don’t need it any way, they are always one with life) because the don’t have the ability to distinguish. They do remember, I believe, they are able to memorize all these movements but they would performed the movements in a random order. The mind is the leader in Tai Chi, however, using the mind doesn’t mean implicitly continues thinking. While practicing, one switches between thinking and no thinking, consciously.