Taomeow

Good find. Yes, a demo, but Xiaowang is powerful beyond comprehension in real life too. He did a workshop at our school a few years ago and "showed off" a bit pushing against eight people simultaneously. None of them were cooperating students of his, and none of them were inexperienced taiji players. Everybody went tumbling down. But he also showed how this kind of skill is worked at. He made everybody stand in a horse stance for an hour, then do silk reeling while digging the sign-of-infinity-shaped hole in the ground with an imaginary tail for another hour, and only then start the routine -- and take 30 minutes with Laojia! At a normal pace it takes 15, when you're making progress you can tolerate 20... 30 is brutal. In fact, impossible. He demands the impossible of the students though, because that's what high level taiji is... the impossible made possible. Oh, to start like he did, at 7! Where's the freakin' time machine?.. But, OK, forget 7... but 17?.. 27?.. All the young kids out there who talk outta their assorted.... um... points of view... about whether a real teacher is necessary or not... while the real teacher, today, is freakin' available, which wasn't the case at all a very short while ago... who do not take the opportunity, do not use the advantage... boggles the mind.

I'm glad you liked it. Yes, there's a lot of Water in taiji, in fact the most available way to study the infinitely versatile behavior of qi is to start out by paying attention to the infinitely versatile behavior of Water, the closest thing to qi in the world of visible manifestations. I have rather mixed feelings about Bruce Lee. On one hand, he did a lot to popularize and romanticize Chinese martial arts, the image of a Chinese hero in general (before Bruce Lee, the hero in the movie had to be, invariably, white, Christian, and people who were not were always the villains). On the other, I do think his art was closer to Chinese opera than to martial arts. He portrays an aggressive fiery hero very convincingly, but in real life he was a boozing, drug-addicted, sex-addicted, plagiarizing (he was in the habit of throwing around lines from TTC in interviews without any attribution to the source, some of which are still quoted by fans as his own! "Be like water!" Says Bruce Lee and who else?..) egomaniac obsessed with his image. In other words, a rather standard Mister Hollywood, and an unthinkable Mister Taiji. He did something way worse to himself though than a "regular" Hollywood style plastic surgery. Because he moved a lot on the set, he sweated. He didn't like the way he looked on film with sweaty armpits, so he had his sweat glands surgically removed. I seriously think this caused his early death (he took a prescription pill which resulted in catastrophic brain swelling -- I don's see how this can possibly be unrelated to his inability to sweat out any poisons that might enter the system.) So, I'd take the teachings of Sifu Bruce with a grain of salt......

We're a surfing area, and some native residents have been at it for generations, taught by their parents who learned it from their grandparents -- really very competent and usually obsessed, surfing all year round. Interestingly enough, we had surfers come take taiji lessons, not for the sake of taiji but for the sake of their main passion, surfing. They invariably understand it WAY better than people who come from hard MA -- because, well, they really need the correct set of skills every time they go into the water, their survival depends on it. So, no BS has ever been heard from this source. The ocean is a great teacher... and no one has ever seen the ocean stiffen a wave as it crushes down on you... It is entirely, perfectly sung -- and if you meet this perfect sung with stiff resistance, tightening, compressing, hardening, any of that... you're dead.

A sung mind is alert and relaxed -- that's how it gets stuff. A mind that is not sung is stiffly committed to winning an argument -- that's how it misses stuff. I keep talking about what my mind got so far from taiji. You keep talking about what your mind got so far from yourself. If you were an embodiment of taiji, you would get taiji from yourself. E.g., Bruce Lee, an embodiment of Hollywood, was getting Hollywood taiji from himself. And you are getting ChiDragon taiji from yourself. There's no other kind you have, but you seem happy enough with what you have, for now. Well, I'm not happy with what I have for now. I need to learn from my teacher. That's because I want real lineage taiji, not Taomeow taiji. I could have Taomeow taiji anytime, but I want the real authentic traditional thing. You, on the other hand, don't. You want ChiDragon taiji, you don't want the real authentic traditional thing. Well... tastes differ.

Since Mythmaker is a man of few words (of at least fewer than me online ), I will spell out what he meant once again. He means that when you don't practice with a partner of matching or higher skill level, you may think your taiji is sung. Once you spar with a partner, you discover that you stiffen -- or rather he or she discovers where you stiffen (which he or she immediately will if his or her skill is superior to yours) -- and uses this force of yours against you the taiji way (borrow, redirect, lure, etc.). You seem to operate under the impression that you are supposed to be relaxed until you apply force, and then you are supposed to stiffen. This is not taiji, and this is not efficient against taiji no matter what stiff art you have and how you apply it. Nothing stiff is efficient against high level taiji. Only higher level taiji or another internal art is efficient against high level taiji. You never stiffen in taiji. Ever. Period. Nor are you ever limp. Ever. Period. And it's not in between either. Sung is as different from both hard and limp as fluency in English is different from fluency in carpentry and embroidery. You can't turn any theory into sung. You can't learn sung from a dictionary. Your body has to learn it from a real teacher, your mind has to get a clue as the outcome, and then your practice has to perfect the real skill rather than a construct of your imagination. The problem being that if you start out with a wrong mindset your body can't ever get a chance to learn. Paradox.

An invitation to a hands-on empirical lesson is theory? And bias? The technique you are continuously using is "blame for what they didn't do, change the subject." This technique is known as bait-and-switch. It is used in dishonest politics and manipulative sales, e.g., but it is not used in taiji. Nor in decent online discussions of taiji.

You are doing fine, Yellow River. However, don't take obsolete armchair researchers' word for what went before what. Didn't they find clay tablets depicting taiji and qigong sequences predating Laozi by some 4,000 years? If I uproot the bookmark, I'll post a picture. I've always read Laozi's Chapter 15 as a set of taiji instructions. I actually use it. "Careful, as if stepping on thin/melting ice" -- try stepping like that instead of thinking about it, and you might discover what "empty" is. (You can't plump any weight on thin/slippery/melting ice, you have to suspend all assumptions about its ability to support you, and yet take a step forward -- without such assumptions. This does things to your mind you can't possibly read into it from a book -- you have to use it like that. Laozi's was a pragmatic age and taoism is a pragmatic philosophy and China is a pragmatic civilization which hasn't given the world a single armchair philosopher, kudos to it. )

Well, let me try breaking down what Mythmaker is talking about. The guys in the video look like what they are, external practitioners, with much body conditioning for external hard performances. In terms of taiji, this is what is wrong with the picture (amounting to the total absence of sung ): locked pinched kua, no bridge between the legs, no stability and balance, no hip flexibility; no emptying of the chest and no filling of the back, mingmen locked, no pivoting in the yao, stiff waist; stiff shoulders, raised instead of dropped every time they move their arms, with locked joints, hence no transference of force through the back, no transference to the arm from the leg, no coordination between leg and arm movements; no suspension of head "on a thread from heaven," locked stiff neck; no sensitivity, no speed, no "borrowing" (each one uses his own force and is completely unable to use that of the opponent instead of squandering his own); and on and on. They are using li and have no cultivated qi at all -- all the qi they have is that of youthful vigor, but as we know from ALL sports (and what they demo is most definitely a sport), this serves a sports-man/woman for a very short time and then the structure they have created (hard muscles, soft bones, depleted internal organs and glands, faltering nervous system, in other words a qi-deficient and/or entangled-qi bodymind) starts taking its toll. But it would take its toll right now if either one of them had to spar with a real taiji master. I've seen it so many times, ChiDragon. A hard MA dude or dudette shows up from time to time to check out my teacher. After ONE lesson of a few seconds they LEARN. Maybe you want to come visit, find out what taiji and taiji sparring is and isn't in a hands-on empirical fashion?.. 'cause no matter how many years you practice, if you don't practice correctly... um...

This is not taiji and this is not sparring. This is a two-person form. Choreography, gymnastics... And here's the real thing -- notice the non-breaking of contact with the partner (remember stick-adhere-follow? ) And here's some nice authentication -- a different style (Wu) but identical principles. Possibly the earliest Wu style video (from 1937, before "wushu" and the post-maoist selling of taijiquan-flavored "sports" and shows to China and the world) -- watch it between 3:40 and 4:55

For me, the best and most reliable way to grasp any taoist philosophical concepts is through practice. In taiji we differentiate between "empty and full" empirically. This is easier to get for the body and then communicate to the mind. The body does it and then the mind goes, aha, OK, got it. When taoist ideas are involved, if you just limit them to the head, they are going to be only shadows of themselves. Taoist ideas are systemic, to be grasped by the totality of you, not just by your mind. In taiji, when you distribute your body weight between your legs and, say, place 99% on one leg and 1% on the other (just touching the floor but not committing any weight to that foot), the leg you are keeping light is called "empty." This "emptiness" means readiness for anything. You can use the "full leg" as your foundation and move to redirect or kick with the "empty" one in any direction, it is not committed to a particular task and a particular destination, so it can go anywhere -- fast. "Emptiness" provides opennes to action, freedom of movement, and lightness that is the foundation of speed, spontaneity, and creativity. You can do anything with your "empty" leg but your "full" one is committed to doing what it's doing, what it's "full" of -- supporting your weight, rooting, accumulating force. Force is accumulated in the "full" but released through the "empty." (This was vehemently argued against the other day by a novice in my taiji class who has extensive hard MA experience. He wanted to commit weight to the "empty" foot in front before punching, and refused to believe that you can -- and should -- transfer the impulse from the full leg in the back to the punching arm and still keep the empty leg empty. Because, you know, you might need to use it in the next split second, why burden it by "filling it up?" He refuses to believe it though. He'll learn... ) When they talk about the "empty force" (which "skeptics" love to hate) in taiji, it's basically the continuation of the same skill of differentiating between "empty" and "full" perfected by long practice and taken to a level that appears miraculous to some and fake to others. But it's actually neither. It's just top level "emptying skill" that is no longer limited to the body and takes over the mind. That's why there's no top level taiji without top level meditation skills, and there's no top level meditation skills limited to the head, the "intent" and whatever. An "empty mind" can't be quite empty if the body doesn't know how to do it, doesn't know lightness and emptiness. And vice versa.

I don't think I did. Russian successfully functioned as the lingua franca of the Russian and then Soviet empire, and the fact that hundreds of millions of people used is this way has little to do with its grammatical expansiveness but much to do with the expansiveness of the empire's drive for domination and with the battles these peoples' ancestors (and themselves) had lost to the imperial troops, then cops, then hangmen. Exactly the way it happened with Latin and English, incidentally, though at a laughably modest (by comparison) scale of 1/6 of earth's dry land, in the case of Russian. Carthago Delenda Est!!! !!!!! I think I want this on my every T-shirt.

You mean English is internationally strong today because of its grammatical adaptability to borrowings? I'm pretty sure it is strong for geopolitical rather than linguistic reasons. Slavic languages are infinitely more flexible in lexis and grammar (there's no English, French, Chinese, Swahili word that can't be turned into a Russian word and subject itself to all the rules of Russian grammar as fluently as any native one... so "president" becomes six cases -- president presidenta presidentom o presidente etc, the adjective presidentskiy, the feminine adjective presidentskaya, plus all the six case changes of the masculine and all six of the feminine adjective, the designation of the president's wife as presidentsha sometimes also used as a common low-flown style word for female president, the collective of president's advisors as presidium but also the premises where they might congregate, the verb presidentstvovat', with its very long paradigm of conjugation capabilities -- presidentstvoval in the past and presidentstvuju in the present etc. but then presidentstvujet for what he or she does now and presidentstvovala for what she did, and then the tongue-in-cheek naprezidentstvoval when the president screwed up, and poprezidentstvoval if he did it and then stopped, and on and on, dozens of ways to use this one borrowed word as dozens of Russian words that offer no resistance to being adopted and adapted. This is the case with any foreign word, with a rather short list of traditional exceptions, one of the curious ones being the word coffee.) Chinese (which has to make every borrowed word immediately inherently meaningful to a native speaker, instead of just adapting an alphabet soup like what an English speaker gets when dealing with "borscht" or "weltschmerz" or "taijiquan") has no built-in limits on the extent of borrowings it can absorb either. French is resistant for reasons of national politics rather than linguistic peculiarities. Things are controlled in this world, and become this or that because of this control far more often than they naturally would. Bingo. Not its hold on hearts and minds though -- its hold on politics and economies and finances and, yes, science, contemporary "modern" science. Except it's not just the Catholic Church. It's the Roman empire. We are it, still. Look where the penguins have taken us.

A code is a code. The motivation for using a code is to hide, not to reveal, information encoded. A lingua franca is a common phenomenon that has always existed among peoples who communicated and traded extensively while speaking many different languages. Most of these many different languages, however, were meticulously destroyed. E.g., Native Americans before the intervention spoke more languages than all of the Old World combined... extinct today courtesy of premeditated linguicide. Now English is their lingua franca... no wait, now it's also their "mother tongue." Not Latin though, because no code language ever coincides with any mother tongue -- or with any currently alive lingua franca. This would defeat its purpose. Swahili is the lingua franca of Africa today, but it is not a code language. If Latin didn't become dead, it wouldn't have become a code language for hiding knowledge. A lingua franca is never hidden by default. Latin basically went through stages (overlapping for a while) -- mother tongue to lingua franca to dead to sacred/code language. When it was alive, other languages were used as code languages. Same deal with Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke), lingua franca for 1200 years. Once it was quite dead, it became the language of scientific discourse (used by European alchemists, among others, for writings absolutely secret of course, along with Hebrew in which, e.g., Nicolas Flamel wrote his alchemical works. Latin was still not unavailable enough and too widely known for purposes of encoding at the time. Dead but still warm, so to speak. )

There was a French researcher who advised everyone to give themselves a quick all-over scratching with the fingernails first thing in the morning, and then at least once again during the day. The rationale: about qi he didn't know anything so he never brought that up, but he brought up prostaglandins which are released in response to this kind of stimulation. Prostaglandins are hormone-like substances that can take on a plethora of functions on an as-needed basis, they are more immediate in their response to many stimuli, are produced fast and removed from the system also fast, while your endocrine glands might still be "thinking about it" before the fact or "cleaning up the mess" after. They are part of what should be termed "alertness of the body," its abilitiy to pay attention to the needs of the moment. There's a massage place in the Asian part of my neck-of-woods where they give excellent and cheap massages (you won't believe how cheap -- people who work there don't speak English and there's many competing businesses of this kind in the vicinity, that must be the reason). They usually start by placing your feet in a bucket of hot water and working on your head, and for a couple of minutes they actually scratch you behind the ears with their fingernails, the way you would a cat. Exquisite!

Particularly in the context of necrophilia we've been discussing. However, it's not what "I" call the languages that no longer have a function of the first natural live native tongue in a live population anywhere. It's the proprietary term of another science, linguistics, in reference to such languages. See http://en.wikipedia..../Language_death and also http://en.wikipedia....tinct_language. (Not the greatest articles on the subject, from the POV of someone educated in comparative linguistics, but I'm too lazy to hunt for better, and too rusty to remember what it was they gave me an M.S. for so many moons ago. ) Latin and Ancient Greek are both "dead" but not "extinct." A language that is dead but still used as a "sacred" one is still dead though. Christian religious studies from which all our modern life sciences were derived in a smooth unbroken transition, inheriting their sacred language, their central image of an entity in the state of death, their casual disdain for "mortal flesh," etc., were indeed conducted in languages the uninitiated weren't supposed to understand. But the purposes of such use of a language are intimidation, exclusivity, elitism, and discrimination, not the spread of knowledge. If the purpose was to spread knowledge, why not spread it in the language the population you're spreading it to comprehends? Walk into a doctor's office today and see what I mean. He talks to you as though you're retarded, in the simplest terms reserved for the simple-minded -- but if you probe for real knowledge behind the pitch, he throws a Latin term at you, end of conversation. Well, I know Latin, and I make a point of using it the second a doctor uses it on me, invariably outplaying him at his own game (for mine is not limited to medical Latin ), but everybody else is duly intimidated when they hear a spellbinding invocation of a sacred language. (It's either Latin or a made-up word -- the ones targeting the largest population groups insert a cross in them, have you noticed? -- FosamaX, PaXil, CelebreX, EffeXor -- as well as, of course, in the RX insignia of every prescription.)

Thanks for your take, Apech. Oh, my view of science is far from negative -- I specified I was talking about life sciences. My "harsh" view in this regard is shared by Linus Pauling of the two Nobel prizes who proved with infallible logic and reason that we have no medical science. Besides what Linus Pauling was talking about (perhaps for some later discussion unrelated to penguins), it's just that I see several problems with science as we know it... um, as we are told it is and isn't. Here's just one, out of quite a few I could point out: Our life sciences are dead. They learn them by opening up corpses, studying under the microscope tissues preserved in formaldehyde, and killing hundreds of millions of helpless "lab" animals (what makes an animal a "lab" animal? -- surely not tao). To base LIFE sciences on DEAD people, animals and tissues is beyond ironic. Beyond insane. Beyond inefficient and beyond conductive to erroneous philosophies of life. It is evil. And writing in Greek (that's not live modern Greek, incidentally, it's Ancient Greek they used for scientific writings, a dead language) so the proles don't understand what the demigods are talking about hasn't gone away at all, only they use "medical Latin" instead (used to be both, but our demigods are getting hard to educate in two dead languages -- but then, they have new dead languages to study instead, have you ever read the PDR? All the words that are made up to name made-up conglomerates of molecules used to "treat" us, as we are told -- and as I believe they are really used, no one is talking about using anything to "heal" us, we are "treated" all right, but to what? -- none of these words have a live counterpart anywhere in the world, unlike, e.g., when you read the Materia Medica of TCM. The latter talks about live things -- roots, flowers, seeds, bugs, animals, all of them real entities encountered in nature. Try finding something like that in the huge tome of thousands of items a med student has to commit to memory -- none of these were born of a mother and a father or hatched out of an egg or burst out of a seed. Dead. Dead shit. And we call it progress? But toward what?.. ??? And please don't tell me they learned to prolong our lives and conquered our once-deadly diseases, that's propaganda and has nothing to do with reality. It's lies. I don't like to be told lies. And truth is nowhere near to be found in our life sciences.)

Yes, I've read parts of it. So, Apech, WHEN does our "real" "modern" "science" BEGIN? What's the zero hour? When did we start doing it exactly? What have we been doing before that date? How did we manage to get so scientific so recently without getting a clue in the prior one million years or so? I submit the zero hour is "never." We don't have life sciences. We have manipulations, prejudice, meddling, playing god with zero qualifications, and making final-truth judgment calls based on prior brainwashing. It was so in 1911 and in 1611 and in 2011. That's why I don't care WHEN they said what they said. They always say the same thing: "I am in the position of power to say what's natural and what's not." They write it on milk cartons -- "I say RBGH is perfectly fine and natural, so suck it up." They said it best in The Simpsons: "Abortions for all! No abortions for anyone! Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!"

Apart from the word "depravity" which is not a term a scientist should be using, nothing in this behavior is unusual except for necrophilia which a scientist should have explained by the combination of the majority of penguins' monogamous fidelity and permafrost that preserves the deceased spouse's body indefinitely. Which is why species living where a corpse disintegrates from the elements rather than is preserved by same, like ours, had to invent embalming to copulate with their deceased loved ones and leaders spiritually, but occasionally physically too -- Alexander of Macedonia, e.g., upon killing the queen of the Amazons repeatedly made love to her dead body. And he's supposed to be one of our historic heroes. Occasional violence latching onto sex (sex is not sex in this scenario but rather a weapon of violence) and occasional use of sex for pain processing rather than procreation is common, but our scientists choose to ignore multifunctional purpose of the sexual release and ascribe only procreational goals to it on the grounds of sheer superficiality of analysis. Our species is engaged in non-procreational sex that has other goals (chiefly a pain-processing mechanism, confirmed by the fact that the most disturbed, abused, suffering individuals are also the ones seeking maximal amounts of sexual encounters and/or solo release) by far more than any other. Oh, and a percentage of all sexually reproducing species engage in same-sex encounters on occasion, so the connotations of "depravity" are religious- rather than scientific-based. Most primates have around 10% same-sex encounters (with some preferring them exclusively while others will engage in them only occasionally, and still others, never), the numbers are perhaps much lower in felines (who also don't hump furniture unlike canines), but none of it is "depravity," scientifically speaking, only behavioral variations around the norm. Depravity begins when the norm is pushed out of existence by those variations though, as is happening today with penguins, polar bears, and all other arctic animals suffering major reproductive problems and exhibiting uncharacteristic sexual behaviors en masse due to DDT poisoning (as one factor ascertained, but perhaps not the only one.)

Is it this one?

http://www.washingto...qJgJ_story.html the rest is edited because the conversation didn't happen

Taoists do like to quote the masters who went before! beginning at 0:25

Not a bad idea to focus on things taoist. But please don't assume an "absolute beginner" level. "I am a taoist" is quite within the range of my to-date Mandarin capabilities. My most memorable accomplishment in China: a crazy-looking old lady approached me and said something, a rather long phrase, then stood there waiting for a response. I responded 我不会说普通话, but since this was the very phrase on whose correct pronunciation I had worked very hard, apparently I said it so well that she didn't believe me. She got angry and started yelling, Hui shuo! Hui shuo! accusing me that I didn't want to talk to HER and because of that pretended that I couldn't speak Chinese. So, do you know of any program along the lines of Pimsleur but centered around things taoist? (Pimsleur is great if the goal is for an American man to learn to pick up Chinese women by getting them drunk, this seems to be the main focus of the chosen conversations, at least the ones I've learned so far from this otherwise wonderful source.) It's got to be interactive and it's got to be conversational. I want help with spoken Chinese, I want fluency, I want Mandarin on autopilot, without having to stick my nose into a book. I want an oral transmission. Whatever can be found in books, I can find on my own. Narrowing it down further: is there a program in existence that uses taoist principles in teaching Chinese?

I started with a private tutor, but he wasn't really a teacher, he was an engineer who offered to help out. The mistake in his teaching style was that he was doing 95% of the talking, instead of making me say or read whatever we were learning a hundred times, correcting me a hundred times if necessary. Instead, he would respond to a mistake by giving a lengthy lecture. Just too damn talkative. Then I took a course at the community school. Same problem. The teacher was great -- and knew it -- and the students were lousy -- and she knew it -- so she enjoyed listening to the only proficient Chinese speaker in class, herself, more than to anyone else. Typically you had 8 second's worth of the hour to say something. And I believe pronunciation is the only real difficulty with this language -- the rest is a matter of applying yourself, but phonetics is something in a class of its own. But they don't know how to teach that and only make fun of the foreigner's attempts instead of breaking down the movements of the organs of speech the way a good taiji or qigong teacher would break down the movements of a routine. They don't give you the precise routine. And it's not easy to figure out on your own. I wound up buying books that do explain how to do it phonetically, but then I don't have a teacher to check and guide my progress, so it all stalled. Then I went to China for a month and a half, and started understanding some of the spoken language, but got even more intimidated speaking myself. Oh, and the incentive? Well, I'm a taoist. There's a lot of things I would like to be able to do without the middle man (interpreter/translator). Besides, I find the language very beautiful. It flows like a river, there's some tao right there in the sound. And in general I admire the way it is organized -- the imprecision of words that have a "cloud of meanings" that describe rather than define phenomena (which is the right way to approach most phenomena IMO, with few exceptions). The pictorial nature of the writing and its aesthetic appeal. So, long story short, I want to have some proficiency in it, but I can't seem to find a mode of steady study.

In classic Chinese novels martial masters exercise their skill by throwing needles at flies and killing them this way. They do it privately, because someone with developed gong would know many of their secrets if he or she observed this. Needle-throwing techniques were cultivated by certain specific schools, whose teachings were not readily shared with the uninitiated. The aim was to hit a vital point in combat, choosing either a lethal or a non-lethal one. A master could also use a device for this that released many needles in a shower, hitting several points or several attackers. Both men and women were trained in this technique, but it was particularly useful for the ladies who weren't expected or allowed to carry weapons.