It all hinges on quietening the mind. Taiji insists that the best way to achieve this is through body and spirit. Using the mind to tackle the mind we consider a bit dumb and doomed to failure, akin to using ego to battle ego or capital to fight Capitalism – too open to corruption. We find, in Taiji, that for the mind to think it needs two things: security and stupidity. Security is produced by introducing tension to break natural connexions, particularly tension in the shoulders which wrenches the arms out of the heart in order to knit them directly into the anxious head, and tension in hips and legs which breaks the connexion between lower and upper body, effectively pulling the groin back from its natural position, maybe only a millimeter or two but enough to give the mind the feeling that it has time and space to calculate before committing. Stupidity (simple-mindedness) is the mind's need to simplify reality in order to cope with it, either by not listening or by calling on past experience – model-building. This, in the body, is double-weightedness (the fusing of joints) and is achieved by locking both sides of the body together by tensing the sacrum, hardening the heart, and/or making up the mind. This prevents cross-energy expressing itself, prevents the separation of yin and yang, in other words prevents Taiji and staunches energy. The mind we seek to quieten is the one that simply cannot embrace opposites without the need to synthesize them into some clever well-behaved whole, the mind that can only function when two (us) is reduced to one (me).