Taomeow

I think the thread can stomach a slight derail, it's not that active, the arts are rare and the OP has only dipped a toe as of now. Only so many hours in the day... and I just ordered a new book on the I Ching/Yijing which is my main area of divinational experience, something translated for the first time and apparently quite up my alley, linking the oracle to the earlier shamanic tradition... But the time will hopefully come to expand into Qimen et al in earnest... I think quite a lot of "wrong sex" issues are wrong conditioning issues, wrong family/social situation issues, artificial developmental/hormonal backdrop issues -- if you remove all of these and are left with "pure" "for a purpose" cases, we would need another ten thousand years of history with all men reincarnating as women multiple times -- being traded for two goats and a sack of wheat, beaten daily because the law tells the father, brother and husband it's their duty, burned at the stake because they are a vehicle of evil and an instrument of the devil, having their feet mutilated by binding for a thousand years, wearing "sexy" clothes with no pockets for a few thousand years because they are not allowed to own any property and if there's money to be had, it can only be in the husband's pocket, being executed by stoning for looking at a man, sent to nunnery or to a brothel for failing to fetch a suitable husband, experimented on by doctors who would cancel natural labor and birth in favor of a scientific approach (beginning with sticking a hand, unwashed after cutting open cadavers ten minutes earlier, into the labor passages to pull the baby to speed things up), well, OK, I'm not derailing it any further but you got the picture. All modern men who complain about modern women being all wrong would have to reincarnate as women thousands of times to find out why. That paragraph belongs elsewhere, I know...

Female astronomers are indeed not that uncommon, but I was talking about cats.

Planet Earth isn't anymore. Earth A used to be, but Earth B where we are now is in the Sagittarius arm. The mind-boggling part being that scientists who used to tell us we're located in the Orion spur now say they've always said Sagittarius arm. A friend of mine is an astrophysicist/astronomer and I specifically asked him. And then showed him videos with residue still surviving here and there from Earth A, where Carl Sagan and Neil Degrasse Tyson (respectively) say Orion spur. And he said "that's obviously a mistake." Glad you remember Orion. Always nice to bump into a fellow timeliner in these occasionally very unfamiliar parts of the galaxy. Especially one of feline persuasion.

My teacher is. But to be truly elitist, I'd offer a different requirement here (I mean if it was my thread, of course ): only post what you see as great expressions of the specific forms you personally practice. Otherwise it's no different from going to youtube and doing a search... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icxGuADIokQ&t=14s

I'm glad you like it. And after the long form it has this advantage of being short... good for slackers... ...unless you do it the way it's done in Chen village, long then short back to back without stopping, the last move of the long form turns into the first move of the short... then repeat the sequence three times, long then short then long, etc. Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't... But seriously, it is only done "correctly" when it is done internally. One way to confirm that you're doing it correctly (or find out you're not) is to check your vitals right after you're done -- if your heart rate and respiration rate increased, you're not doing it correctly. The mantra of taiji classics, "use qi not li," is very verifiable. If you use li, your vitals will go up, as from a sports performance. If you use qi, they will stay put as though you're sitting in a chair meditating rather than jumping and kicking and punching.

@ flowing hands:

@ flowing hands: I respectfully disagree with everything you said. You only need dit da medicine with this form if you do it as an external stint. Which is what someone trained in external arts might attempt, and invariably injure himself. This form is precise and requires no improvements. None. Not when you do it the way it is supposed to be done -- after your long form (Laojia Yilu in this case) has become fully internal, after years of correct practice. Iron this and iron that methods are for bodies that don't mind trading in sensitivity for insensitivity, losing a chance for exponential speed-of-reaction development, and willing to get used up rather than building internal power slowly but surely (with no age cut-offs or limitations). I.e. they are not for taoist bodies. It all depends on what you want to do with yours. Different strokes...

Thank you, YFS! Missed this earlier...

This is my short form, Chen Laojia Erlu, aka Cannon Fist. Still working on that jump at 1:45.

Russia

Before I clean up, pick up your guns and beat it. You don't want to watch.

On this haiku chain which you're yanking like a boss drag the thought-crime down

It's just that "being present" is such a wide umbrella. What's your left little toe doing right now? Were you present to that when I asked? Was it heavier or lighter than the right one? Warmer or colder? Did you make it like that on purpose? What was the purpose? The long form leads to where you fit so much more under that umbrella.

More than I can express short of writing a book. To point out a few benefits: There's an inner logic to the sequence of moves in a traditional form. This sequence is the outcome of genius coupled with unwavering focus and dedication of many generations (of the Chen family in the past 400 years, to say nothing of the forerunners and later disciples). The masters knew how qi flows in the body, and designed a series of movements that work on exactly the same flow that is activated naturally during a 24 hour period, reaching peak expression in each consecutive meridian every 2 hour period, in sequence. Each movement activates each organ of the body in the same sequence, in a time-fractal fashion, and in the long form this cycle of running qi through this "training wheel" is repeated 3 times. Next, the inner logic of the martial application of these moves. Another name for taiji is "shadow boxing," and for an experienced practitioner this "shadow" is real, and undertakes realistic attacks which you realistically respond to in the long sequence. In the short, it is very confusing -- what is it that you're doing, and why, and what for?.. Your body and your mind learn a short form by rote, there's no inner necessity to do this and then immediately that... In the long form, for a beginner, there isn't any either, but as you gain experience, it becomes more and more obvious. It's not unlike grammar -- there's good grammar and bad grammar, and you gain much better language skills via exposure to good grammar. Now let me paraphrase this sentence, shorten, simplify, bring closer to the level of the everyday speaker: "It's, like, you know, grammar... like, you learn grammar and shit." You can still vaguely guess at what I mean... but... Next, the famous "relaxation response" -- modern science asserts it takes a minimum of 12 to 18 continuous minutes to accomplish. That's the average time it takes to complete the long form at the "normal" taiji pace (mine takes about 17 at regular pace, although a beginner is likely to do it a bit faster. If I want the kind of relaxation that transforms into deep meditative state, I can do 45. Which is simultaneously a bone-building, core-building workout. What else can combine the most strenuous physical activity with the deepest unwavering focus of profound meditation?.. Only the long form done excruciatingly slowly.) Next, the impact on the mind that nothing else can offer. What kind of impact? All sorts of things that are the opposite of "spaced out," "brain-foggy," "unaware," "distractible," "mind racing" and so on. You can do the short form while your mind wanders elsewhere. You absolutely can't do the long form like that. Out of the question. The moment it wanders, you forget where you are and mess things up. So that's when you know that the goal of uniting the body and the mind demands that the mind stays put where the body is. This is the most difficult part of the training for many. The long form places extraordinary demands on awareness and immediately tells you where you're at in this respect, no need to guess, you get accurate information every time. The short form is too short and you can do it on autopilot while your mind attends to unrelated stuff. To name a few .

The difference is the same as between reading a book vs. reading the blurb on the back cover highlighting its plot. Or between watching a movie vs. watching a trailer to that movie. As the student of the master whose first teacher created several short forms (including the standardized 24 and the 32 taiji sword form) and was instrumental to taiji having been re-legalized and re-embraced in post-Maoist China and propagated worldwide, I believe I am offering an informed opinion.

I still do, on and off. Q: Why is New Jersey called The Garden State? A: Because Oil, Petroleum, Chemical, Nuclear, Landfill, and Toxic Waste State didn't fit on a license plate.

The Chinese Almanac says it's an Open Day filled with blessings.

I'll start with the latest. Yesterday I was driving somewhere, stopped at a long, boring red light, turned the radio on. There was a second-long pause, and within that second I looked ahead and saw that the car stopped in front of me had a custom license plate that said, "Eagles." Then the radio started playing "Hotel California," smack from the opening chords, from the very beginning.

你们两个，你没有帮忙

OK, someone please explain this to me. Taiji camp. Lots of practice, interspersed by short lectures pertaining to same. Some of the participants are Chinese, so teacher occasionally formulates something or quotes a famous saying from taiji lore in Chinese and asks one of them to translate it to the rest, he likes to engage everybody's abilities no matter what they are and lets people show all their strong suits. So, if you are fluent in Chinese, he'll ask you to translate something. At one point he offers a couple of sentences in Chinese and asks, who knows what this means? I say, I do. The reason I do is, the few words I do know out of the otherwise impenetrable phrase, coupled with the overall context of the lecture, tell me I'm familiar with this particular saying. So I translate it. Accurately and elegantly, because I know the accurate and elegant literary translation, not because I've come up with it myself. It's a joke, I know it's funny that I'm the one who can translate it out of the blue, so I strike this scholarly pose and deliver in a pedantic voice of an English professor. Every single word I uttered was in English. In the next couple of days, three different Chinese taiji folks, independently of each other, approached me and complimented me on my amazing command of the Chinese language. I told each of them I don't know it, I just studied a bit and spent a few weeks in China, so I recognize some phrases when I hear them. "But no, I can tell you know it so well. And your pronunciation! It's impeccable." What??? What pronunciation? I never said a word in Chinese, folks, I was translating what teacher said, I only spoke English... They wouldn't listen! "Oh, and you're humble too!" All my attempts at setting the record straight were chalked up to humility. They were convinced, somehow, that they heard me speak Chinese -- impeccably. Yeah, I wish. Then an American dude comes up to me and says, I need something translated from the Chinese, it's just half a page, would you mind helping me? I tell him, I can't read Chinese, just a few characters here and there... He says, really? -- with an air of suspicion, as though I'm inventing excuses so as not to help him. But you speak Chinese so fluently, how come you can't read it? I don't speak fluently, I start... he waves a dismissive hand. "I heard you. You spoke fluent Chinese the other day, I know you speak it very well." Now, as I said in the beginning, can someone please explain this to me. Why were four people convinced they heard me speak Chinese, something that never happened in this reality?..

The original Zoroastrianism, if memory serves, had twin gods, one of matter, one of spirit. The noteworthy difference of this arrangement from later Indo-European ideas being that the "good" god was the god of matter, and the god of spirit was "evil." So it was not non-dualistic, rather it was non-patriarchal. (All patriarchal religions favor spirit over matter. Matter=mater=mother=mother Earth is what they consider a "fall" from the spiritual heights of the immaterial pattern=pater=father=someone/something good somewhere else, not right here in the material world with children. Punishment for the children's sins, obviously. For being of matter, mother. To this day, you can see no image of a good mother coming out of Hollywood. If she's good, she's dead, fondly remembered but absent. If she's present, she's never good. Never a role model. Never someone to be close to and benefit from it. Mostly either bitchy or insane or neglectful or needy or sick or addicted to various substances or promiscuous or inept or... but I digress.) Another noteworthy difference -- for both Zoroastrian gods it was a choice. God is not bereft of free will and isn't good or not-good "by default." God is not a machine running a "good" program, the way it does in Indo-European religions. He can choose good over evil, or evil over good. One of the Zoroastrian twins chose an evil pattern...

Wonton is a version of pronouncing hundun. The primordial chaos is in fact the primordial unity. Chaos=unity. The Chinese are fond of soups because their health and healing tradition asserts that soup is a unity. Different ingredients have spent time together, under extreme reshaping conditions, had a shared experience, communicated, and came to a mutual agreement regarding the most harmonious coexistence that would be impossible for the separate ingredients under any conditions outside the soup. It is thought of as establishing a harmonizing pattern in the body because of that, and most Chinese eat soup daily. (So do most traditional cultures that have preserved their cuisine.) Chaos=ultimate harmony. (Yes, our language has tricked us into misunderstanding it, using the word interchangeably with "disorder," "a mess." Nope. The source of all order is not a mess. It's a unity and a harmony.)

Yes, it's a spectrum. People whose eyes can see the spectrum from red to violet but not from infrared to ultraviolet have to rely on hearsay when someone tells them that (e.g.) a pit viper sees from far infrared to deep ultraviolet -- with the skin on the sides of its body at that -- and decide whether to believe it or not without any personal input from any of their own organs. People who see a part of the taiji spectrum (usually a tiny part) better believe there's more. But if you are a pit viper, you don't know the words to hiss into the human ear to explain what you can see and how. It's beyond miscommunication -- it's living in different worlds. The thing with taiji is, the real, the fake and the in between all live in different worlds, and they can't communicate efficiently. Yet I feel compelled to share a few thoughts around the subject... At the level of the Supreme Ultimate, taijiquan is the kind of martial art tao itself practices -- it's the fight of being against nonbeing, a fight won every time, an eternal triumph. Tao can't lose to nonbeing because the nature of nonbeing is to engender being. This is the game of the immortals. The playing field is eternity, and the ball never stops rolling. A notch below that, at the level of the Ten Thousand Things, taijiquan is the art of rolling ten thousand things into one ball and being that ball. You can roll over anyone being that ball of ten thousand things. Roll back. Roll over, under, around, on top, on bottom, full speed ahead... peng, lu, ji, an... cai, lie, zhou, kao! A notch below that -- you are a hypersensitive yin-yang creature in command of your own ten thousand perceptions, and you assess the situation accurately every time due to this cultivated gongfu. You know what you can do. You know what you can't do without having to try and fail -- once you commit to trying, you don't fail, because you've tried it ten thousand times before and know what you can and can't do right now. As a sister-art's (Shaolin) saying goes, "I don't fear the ten thousand different kicks you've practiced. I fear the one kick you've practiced ten thousand times." You don't have any inefficient weapons in your arsenal. If it's inefficient, you already know it and you won't use it until you've improved on it. Whatever you use does the job you want it to do. A notch below that -- you are a medium level practitioner of real taiji. Perhaps you've invested fifteen, twenty years under a great master. Perhaps he or she or someone else has given you a "taste" of the notch above, of where you're headed if you keep at it. This keeps you interested and keeps you going. It wasn't much, but it told you everything you needed to know to keep going. Sometimes instantaneously. A notch below... and so on and so forth. Then there's a whole spectrum of "fake" taiji. At the top there's "fake" that has a chance to go real given the right encounter, if it's your destiny you'll find out. Or "fake" that has some features of "real" because "real" is the universal laws of being and nonbeing and you may be talented and you may have spontaneously discovered some of them, just a tiny bit. Or "fake" that is "real" on the level of taiji of the mouth -- you say all the right things but your body can't do them, does not understand those words. Or "fake" that is full of shit in the head but the body takes over and still manages to overrule that and do a bit of the real thing. Or utterly, completely fake, disgusting, a self-aggrandizing triumphant abomination, a walking talking fraud. A trap for the unfortunate among the seekers, a trap sometimes innocent/ignorant, sometimes greed motivated, grandeur mania motivated, self-serving con artistry, you name it. A huge spectrum it is. "Taijiquan" is like "life" -- just saying the word gives one no idea of what kind of "life" is being discussed, and what kind of taijiquan, and where exactly it is on that spectrum. So my advice to those who want to invest in unsolicited judgments... invest in something else. Judge a book by its cover. Judge a pudding without eating it. You will get better return on your investment of effort...

Taijiquan, the Supreme Ultimate Fist