Taomeow

Hey, appreciate your sincere effort, Effilang, and have this to offer for your consideration: 1. There's no need to salvage anything -- "what is good of kunlun" is "all of it," it's just not good for "everyone," and no one has the power to make "everything" good for "everyone." 2. "All" don't say this is bad, "all" who have no experience with it don't count regardless of what they say, and among those who do have experience with it, "most" say it's good or don't say anything. "A few" who found it's "bad" for them will be found in absolutely any modality regardless of how good or how bad it is. My mother is severely allergic to shrimp. I love shrimp. Doesn't make me, her, or the shrimp good or bad. "Most" people like shrimp, "a few" will have true and sincere horror stories about the allergies... catch my drift? 3. You can't offer to make an authentic system better unless you have the guts, the energy, and the authority. That's what Max did, by the way, due to having all of the above. It's rare and not for dabblers. When I wanted to improve on the system for my personal practice I asked the teacher if what I was planning was OK to do. He said yes. If he said no I wouldn't do it. Respect for the system and the teacher is partial prerequisite for its successful application, its absence can bust the process from the get-go.

Just yesterday I listened to a radio interview by a woman who told the story (and now has started a foundation) of mj saving the life and sanity of her severely autistic son. The "munchies" that a recreational user might find a funny side effect did half the job -- the boy had been starving himself to death and weighed 38 pounds at age 10. Its calming effects did the other half of the job, by eliminating his violent self-destructive and dangerous-to-others impulses that were business as usual all his life, within hours. He was on 13 prescription meds, none of them working, by the time his mom gave him a brilliant doctor-prescribed mj brownie; he is down to 2 by now, and thriving. (THIS is the crucial fact behind mj illegalization: it is a frisky competitor with psychiatric and mood-altering pharmaceuticals, far superior to all of them for pretty much all purposes they are used for. "Destroy the competition with extreme prejudice" is the first law of the jungle we live in where pharmaceutical companies are the lion king.) A few years ago, I've taken chemo-devastated cancer patients, prescription in hand, to a local mj dispensory, and this also meant the difference between life and death (did you know that 40% of people who die of cancer do not die of cancer, they die of starvation? another 40%, of multiple organs failure, often triggered by starvation? and only 20% of the disease itself?..) The dispensory, however, was being raided by the FDA on a fairly regular basis, even though the state law says it was operating legally. (God bless the highly spiritual -- you wouldn't guess he was a buddha from just looking -- and casually courageous Rasta guy who ran the facility and wouldn't be intimidated. He used to tell his very sick clients, "I am a law-abiding citizen. Show me a prescription and I'll get it for you. If they raid me every day, I'll get it for you. If they close me down, I'll get it for you. If they put me in jail, I'll still get it for you and that's a promise.'') Oh, and personally, I didn't grow up in a recreational mj culture (alcohol was what my peer group was into instead, and half of my high school friends became alcoholics, and my high school boyfriend, who joined the club by his early twenties, is dead.) I react way too strongly to have a chance in hell to use it "recreationally." It causes me to communicate with the spirits of the Eight Directions, so I can only use it magically, or not at all. In magical taoism, as well as in Dragon Gate, as perhaps in other schools, as in Hindu and Buddhist traditions (sic -- read Rick Strassman's research), as of course in all of shamanic traditions of the world, sacred herbs have been used for millennia. Modern kids use them dumbly? What DON'T they use dumbly? Sex? Why don't we illegalize that while we're at it, it also dims the brain and wastes time and makes one lazy and distracted, and can cause severe side effects like unwanted pregnancy and STDs and what not?.. Oh, I forgot... sex doesn't happen to compete with pharmaceutical drugs. It happens to promote their use, the Pill and the Zovirax and what not. Big difference, obviously. Oh, and as for using it for training -- depends on what you train in, it can help or hinder. It is not a drug, it is not dumb like that. It's an herbal medicine of considerable power, it works for or against you depending on who you are.

Each reflecting each: In the Heaven of Indra, there's a string of pearls...

think "uprooting"

I see. Where I come from I knew a woman, an ordinary one before she was hit by a lightning, and an extraordinary healer since the event. She described her experiences after the event, and apparently she acquired the ability to see human internal organs in light and color while losing her ability to see them any other way -- she couldn't see the "surface" anymore, only a collection of "internals." She went to med school a few years down the road in order to be able to understand what she was looking at. She could heal without this understanding, from day one, but she couldn't feel fulfilled if it just happened mechanically. So I have this idea that "understanding" -- the meaningfulness of qi I was talking about earlier -- might be this "higher vibration" you're talking about. It is definitely not mechanical. This woman was suffering from an assortment of -- I'd say "physico-spiritual conflicts" -- "not understanding" what she was perceiving or doing made her feel sick and miserable, and actually studying anatomy and physiology ("lower vibration" goodies) healed her, the healer. That's what I mean when I say that qi of a certain task needs to be "optimal" -- of "optimal vibration" rather than "higher-better-than- lower." Regardless... thanks for the explanation, and I've a question: I was given the ability in a shamanic way, but there's weird strings attached... so I'm not able to use it unless I agree with the strings. (No, nothing "bad" or "dark" or "evil," no "pact" with anything or anyone... a different kind of strings, hard to explain...) So my question is... Did your ability come at no cost to your concept of who you are? Is it something you find easy to accept?

I will be happy to have helped with the essay, but the idea is not mine, I originally got it from the Yuan Dao translated and foreworded by Roger Ames and T.C. Lau. It has served me well over the years; may it serve you well as well. Agree with Winn. Yes, "definition" is possible with taoist concepts the way someone would use it to mean "visible expression" -- as in "muscle definition" -- it would mean embodiment (ti?..) Except one would embody (define) something taoists rather than bodybuilders are after -- ti tao, ti taiji, etc.. Which is done via practice of taoist arts and sciences and moral values, not via attaching verbal labels to certain concepts a certain way. "Muscle definition" comes from lifting weights. "Tao definition," from dropping them?.. definitely not from talking "about" them -- but provided you're "handling" them, not just talking "about" them, talking "about" weight lifting doesn't interfere with one's ability to lift, and likewise, talking "about" tao doesn't interfere with one's ability to embody it. Laozi talked about nothing but, then went ahead and became a celestial immortal.

Ya Mu, I didn't mean it's a "fixation" with you, sorry if I made it sound like that. I meant it is a fixatedly popular western-spiritual interpretation, for which I don't know a taoist counterpart. I am all for oral tradition and some of the most important things I've been taught have never been written down, but they were usually congruent with taoist basics or with common sense or what have you. Even if they were just "postulated" as axioms, without further explanations, I could eventually understand the why's and wherefore's either empirically, or logically, or intuitively. This is not the case with the "higher vibration qi," for which I can't find any taoist sources nor an empirical, logical or intuitive justification of my own. It is very popular in oral transmissions from new age sources, but I'm not "against" it -- I'm just genuinely concerned about possibly missing something they know?.. These sources, by the way, didn't get it from an oral transmission. It is from Crowley, far as I know.

Little1, about the first "formula" of TTC... I think people confuse two important points made by pretty much all authentic taoist sources and mistake one for the other: they all assert that tao cannot be defined; none of them assert tao cannot be described. This is crucial to grasp, because once grasped, it radically eliminates object-oriented thinking and installs process-oriented thinking or at least the first seedlings thereof. Tao cannot be defined. Qi cannot be defined. Nothing taoist can be defined! Yet tao can be described. Qi can be described. Everything taoist can be described! In other words, to define is to substitute, to substitute is to lie. If we say tao is this or that, qi is this or that, then this "this or that" is what we offer to replace the process of tao, to replace the process of qi, etc.. "Tao is emptiness" or "tao is nothingness" are popular examples of such lies -- and lies they are because they substitute the defining party's idea, whatever it happens to be, for the real thing, by saying the real thing (tao) IS what the defining party chooses to say it 'IS'. Ah but it ISN'T! However, if we describe tao -- "eternal, yet changing, unchanging, yet all change comes from it," add to the description observations of its behavior -- "the way of tao is motion and the pattern of this motion is return," add to that more observations we can describe -- "tao patterns itself on itself" -- and on and on -- we spend our life observing, contemplating, and describing the truth, never for a moment defining a lie. So "tao can be spoken," "tao is not eternal" -- these are words that can't be understood by defining them! A translator (or a reader of the original for that matter) who inserts what isn't there -- "tao THAT can be spoken" followed by a grammatical inversion "IS NOT the eternal tao" turns a description into a definition -- and immediately lies. "Tao can be spoken" is a simple description, and it is true, and it is OBVIOUSLY true, we've been talking about tao long since the cows have come home! Now "tao is not eternal" may or may not be juxtaposed to the first statement. May or may not. It can't be inferred from reading the book! It is not MEANT to be inferred thence! One must live -- and live in a certain fashion that is described, not defined, in same book -- in order to find out. About my question above: you're probably right. Also, to me it seems to be another example of those "definitions instead of descriptions" I'm so in favor of avoiding.

Sorry if I'm missing something, I haven't read all of the discussion, but I was wondering if you (or anyone) could explain to me where this "vibration fixation" can be found in taoist sources? It is a staple of many other traditions, but I haven't come across these ideas in the original taoist canon. I've seen evidence that the nature and quality of a certain type of qi is defined by the following (and more than the following): spacial direction (Water descends, Metal contracts, Wood expands, Fire ascends, Earth rotates -- or sits still depending on the type of diagram you're looking at, one that places it in the cycle of transformation or one that looks pre-Copernican and places it in the center; now then, East, West, South, etc. qi -- the eight directions of the bagua -- these are also about the vector of qi in space); timing/timeliness (expressed by ascribing properties of the four seasons to the cosmic process -- Conception, Growth, Fruition, Consummation -- as well as to the directional qi of the bagua -- Spring, Summer, etc.; these describe qi in terms of its placement in the cycle of time); thermal characteristics (hot, neutral, cool, cold; these might have something to do with "vibraiton" and "density" but there's no evidence in taoist sources that "higher" is superior to "lower" in all situations and for all purposes -- rather, "optimal" is sought for a particular purpose); celestial or terrestrial origins and affiliations (qi of Heavenly Stems and qi of Earthly Branches); age (old qi and young qi); reliability (heng qi, which is long-lasting, reliable and predictable for long periods of time, like qi of the sun, the moon and the stars, vs. yi qi -- yi as in the Yi Jing, aka the I Ching, the Changes of Irregular and Unreliable Nature); and on and on. Qi is the most fascinating subject of study EVER. (Don't nobody go there, I mean where I'm told I ought to experience in via practice -- I have and I do and this gives me a right to assert it's not just my body that studies qi experientially, it's my mind too! -- e.g. when I contemplate a feng shui problem -- which is a qi problem you can't solve by "experiencing it in the body" unless you're a dishonest practitioner -- or, more often than not, when I practice something that requires my body and my mind -- nah, my -- gasp -- intellect! -- I know, I know, a dirty word here! -- something that requires my body and my intellect to unite lest no experience will take place -- e.g., Lingbao Bifa...) Anyway, back to my question... can anyone point me in the direction of an original taoist source where the concept of "low density is a mark of second-rate qi" is to be found?

Here they are -- A to Z http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/vida_ali...ien_races00.htm

No.

You are correct! So let's restore phonetic justice here! Something propels it -- Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, in all likelihood.

This is pretty close to my understanding, but then, whenever one talks of qi in its proprietary taoist terms without giving it a paternalistic pat on the shoulder from western-scientific viewpoint, it will be. (I always envision this young bully, "western science," with a smirk on his face and a gun where his balls should be, condescendingly patting a robe-clad hoary five-thousand-year old sage on the shoulder -- move along, pops, you don't know nothin' about nothin'. Nevermind that the gunpowder was invented by the latter and not used for three hundred years afterwards because of "cowardly demonic qi" discerned within it (sic!) -- until some Europeans bribed an emperor, and that's how our collective glory began.) It is such a beautiful sequence, xiantian to houtian, and it explains everything (though not everything can be "experienced" -- slap me silly, the initial impulse that sends the stillness of xiantian into houtian motion, coming from the trigram of Thunder, is mystery of mysteries! I've been meditating on it for years and I still feel being sucked into a vortex of mystery whenever I'm beginning to perceive that. It may be that a popular "qi is electricity" idea is derived from that impulse, unconsciously known to all from their own genesis?.. But this Thunder impulse comes when all the qi possible, all the unmanifest qi of the perfectly balanced xiantian, is already there... So the moment of manifestation is the moment of perception, and that's why whoever feels tingling and buzzing and sees the light etc., whether actual or "scientific," thinks "this is qi" -- whereas this is their first chance to notice some effects of qi -- an eternity too late and a buck short! )

Dear Mr. Obama, It has come to our attention that your party (not the Democratic one, you know which one I mean) has installed pyramids and parking lots to replace our ancestral forests. As a result we the people have to pay for basic necessities of survival such as food, water, shelter, medical and dental care. At the same time, certain individuals do not charge the public for such surplus luxuries as taiji, qigong, feng shui, enlightenment, and the like. We find it outrageous. We urge you as our pro forma representative to act on this matter and make it vice versa, the way it should be, by amending our constitution accordingly. Yours truly, "I had to pay for my fruitcake"

Ha, I don't even see any rift in my soul. Among other things it did, a rain forest shamanic practice reconciled me with Buddha and Jesus. I'm not kidding. I wonder if there's a buddhist or Christian who could reciprocate, telling me that Buddha or Jesus specifically went to the trouble of reconciling them with shamanism. Would make my day.

I don't know. Mostly a joke. They sell it in spray cans. You spray it on your clothes (supposed you own any synthetics -- I don't) to rid them of static electricity. If you demo an electric zap that my mind translates into "Ah, today is Monday," I will ask you what or who the translator was. I submit it was qi in its shen manifestation. I submit without it you could zap me, yourself, or the neighbor's dog ad infinitum and exhaust the capabilities of all local power plants and cause a statewide blackout and still the electricity you used up wouldn't generate a Monday in anyone's head. No, of course it is not. I never said it was information, consciousness, or universal intelligence, neither do any of the taoist classics whose qi has shaped my understanding. I said it was Pattern Change. I added it was meaningful. Meaningful does not equal intelligent, informative, conscious, etc.. Meaningful is far greater than any of these. A drop of rain and a ray of sun are meaningful to a seed in the ground -- they mean "wake up and grow." A drop of cyanide is meaningful to the human body -- it means "die." It's always more than a thought -- it's a Change. Change is bigger than electricity, nor is predicated on electricity for to happen. Oh, and energy is predicated on change, not vice versa. Every equation of modern physics shows an intimate connection between energy and time. Time is the medium of change, qi is the messenger and the message, energy is the side effect. Qi is not a substance. It does carry stuff, but not the way a river carries a boat. It is simultaneously the river and the boat and the destination. And yet it is never reducible to the river, the boat, or the destination. And it is not "all there is." It is "all that changes, and change itself, and what it changes into." If you want to apply western sciences to taoist concepts, I humbly suggest fractals, chaos, and power laws, not electricity and magnetism and the rest of Maxwellian goodies of the heyday of reductionist fundamentalism.

The traditional way to define qi is by showing what it is not. It is not breath, because it is present in things that don't breathe -- e.g., books, paintings, or swords. It is not life force, because it is present in corpses, stones, and ghosts. It is not electricity, because it is present in the antistatic fluid. It is not energy, because it can both create and undergo transformations without any energy involved. E.g., Monday becomes Tuesday without having spent any energy on accomplishing that. Everybody knows what a "Monday" is but the only thing that can cause it to exist is the qi of its meaning. Similarly, if your parents already have a son and you are then born to them, their firstborn undergoes a qi transformation that will affect him for the rest of his life -- to wit, one that has caused him to become someone's brother -- without having spent any energy on the transformation. Qi is a rearrangement of the Pattern. Qi both causes and is caused by a rearrangement of the Pattern. Qi is Change Itself, Potential for Change, and the Outcome of Change all wrapped into one. "Change" is a far vaster concept than "life," "breath," or "energy," let alone "electricity" or some such. Change is an inherent property of tao-in-motion, a space-time phenomenon of the most fundamental order. However, qi is most useful to understand as "meaningful change," which is why the Book of Changes doesn't go beyond 64 transformations thereof, which cover the whole scope of meaningful situation of change possible in space-time; a greater number of subdivisions creates meaningless fragmentation, and that's the level where you lose qi and are stuck with "pure energy." Shudder. When tackling qi, it is always useful to remember that it is always meaningful. Energy may or may not be meaningful -- break a cup and you will be hard pressed to figure out what the meaning is of every shard and every sliver, though energy is what caused each one of them to manifest. Break a cup by throwing it against the wall while arguing with your significant other, and the qi of the act means lots and lots of things besides and beyond its sheer energy. In fact, it can generate or destroy energy far surpassing that of the breaking point of the cup, It can break up a marriage, e.g., and eliminate a whole line of posterity for the next three billion years. Or it can generate it. Qi of the moment, i.e. potential for change inherent in it, is not inferrable from the amount of strong, weak, gravitational, or electromagnetic forces it contains. It is inherent in the nature, quality and timing of the pattern, in its meaning. It can be tremendous if the pattern places it in such a position -- or none at all beyond the sheer muscular energy you've spent on the act. I said it before and I'll say it again. Qi is the medium and message of meaningful change.

Noble pursuits! that's a comment, and as for suggestions, here goes: 1. Talking to strangers is fine, but doing it with conscious awareness of the dynamics turned on is better. Strangers will start out either asking you a lot of questions or expecting you to ask them a lot of questions for a conversation to take place. That's because people are used to being noticed by strangers only for looking a certain way and ignored for all other purposes. So they will ask questions in order to maintain a conversation if they're emotional adults, or expect to be asked questions if they're emotional kids (regardless of biological age). Stir in the direction you want to go by closely monitoring whether you're drilling, being drilled, or naturally conversing as equals. The "who's asking and who's answering" is a reliable indicator. If you notice the stranger is doing all the asking, you want to turn it around, establish that you are not an emotional child, by taking the questioning initiative: answer briefly and then deflect with an "and what about you?" "and what's your opinion on...?" and so on. If you notice the conversation dies unless you ask questions, turn it around, ask, "do you want to know something about me?.." (If they say yes, that's your chance to be the child and babble away! If they say no, look for someone else to talk to!) And of course if it's spontaneous, equal, easy, and going back and forth like a dance, well... then this stranger is worth not remaining a stranger anymore! 2. Puzzles -- um, no. Problem-solving is learned by solving problems. Do you have problems in your life? Does someone you know have problems no one is helping them solve? Put your mind to that. (Just don't enforce your solutions -- try to find them but don't force-feed them.) 3. For creativity -- create. Hey, there's this haiku chain that's been going on for eons, 103 pages thereof -- why don't you come over and create a haiku? You would immediately see what a creative task is like in its most rudimentary form: there's freedom to express (whatever you like to put there, any image, any thought, you're the boss) and there's strict limitations too (5-7-5 syllables only to squeeze all of your imagination of the moment into, and the first line is already taken by someone else's imagination since it's a chain where you have to link onto the last line of the previous haiku, so you only have 12 syllables to utter... tough -- and realistic when applied to any creative process where you can't go any which way, you have to link yourself to humanity somehow, that's the only, but crucial, difference between the creative process and the schizophrenic process.)

I did some serious work at one point with a shaman's apprentice. He was a young guy, too young and ordinary to inspire any great expectations -- when I found out he'd be doing shamanic work while the shaman was away, I got upset, thinking, oh great, I'm stuck with this nobody now... Well, he showed up in a different dimension and demonstrated hands-on power over life and death, for starters, then read my mind and communicated with me telepathically, then saw exactly the people I saw in my visions and knew who they were (with no information he could possibly get from me or anyone in advance), then intervened on my behalf and at my request in the spirit world and got the results I needed, then made himself a "nobody" again when it was over. He left me in awe of his compassion, humility, and power -- but he never even mentioned he had any of it, he was "just a student" according to him. THAT's what the real thing looks like... I've encountered the real thing on a number of occasions and the pattern is always the same: they show you the money, not the credit cards.

There's this concept presented by Castaneda's Don Juan that applies to teachers using such methods -- a Petty Tyrant. The premise being that the Great Tyrant is reality itself -- that's who pushes us around sometimes with utmost brutality -- so to deal with that, one has to get training from Petty Tyrants. It's a prerequisite for handling reality in a reality-based fashion, not in an ideology-based manner that fails every time the Great Tyrant strikes, and many times a Petty Tyrant does too. However, this doesn't mean that everyone who chooses to behave as a petty tyrant is a teacher and is doing it in order to ultimately help the student. In fact, in most cases a petty tyrant is only that and nothing more, no teacher, just someone who has been conditioned (by petty tyrants in his/her own upbringing) to get his/her occasional kicks out of being nasty to other people. Doesn't mean one can't use them as Petty Tyrant Teachers though, but that's the merit of the student who can master the technique, not of the accidental teacher who has nothing but nastiness to teach. Perhaps there's a level where differentiating purposeful teacher-tyrants and nasty-ziran people becomes unnecessary. Everyone can learn everything from everybody, theoretically. But the real learning happens when pain is transformed into something useful (the way an irritating, painful grain of sand that gets inside an oyster is transformed into a pearl by the oyster who succeeds and isn't killed by it). When it is merely numbed out, when people decide to pretend (to themselves and/or in front of others) that what is hurtful and is meant to hurt is not hurting them, then no learning happens, nor any useful transformations -- only make-believe games of make-believe wisdom and spiritual superiority. The second Reality strikes though, down the drain they go. IMO, as usual.

Well, I don't want to argue too much about what's possible on the inside of a taoist immortal, and besides I wasn't being literal when I said "under the armpit" -- I should have specified he moved his liver up and all the way away from its 'anatomically correct' location but the armpit was added for fun, I have no clue where he moved it in relation to the armpit. Surgeons know more than non-surgeons about human insides, sure thing, yet they too deal with a static moment (an unhealthy one at that) in a human life, and that's still a bit of a stuffed nightingale. When I was 6, a surgeon told me I would always have trouble tying my shoe laces and such because of three complicated fractures in my elbow joint and shoulder. I distinctly remember a passionate "no way" arising from my -- I'd have to say kidneys! -- in response to that prognosis. I was doing competitive gymnastics two years later. No one ever noticed there's something amiss with my left arm since I was, like, 10 -- until my taiji teacher started telling me that the flow of qi is all wrong in my left arm during certain taiji moves. I told him why and told him I'm still working on it... There's absolutely nothing physically wrong there by now, and yet there's an invisible obstacle to the flow of qi no surgeon would notice, something a taiji pro did... Weird, huh? Likewise, there's invisible obstacles of an individual AND a more universal kind all over an average human body, and true cultivation addresses them on all levels -- physical and subtle alike -- which makes lots of seeming impossibilities mere normal function. (Our current idea of "normal" has undergone such extreme inflation, what passes for normal is actually severely stifled...) Oh, and about the muscles between the ribs -- I don't mean move with breathing, cut me some slack there! (No, not with the scalpel, please! ) I mean move like a snake, to locomote without using one's extremities, as well as change the shape of one's chest like an octupus. (Well, almost... the octopus has an additional benefit of having no bones of course.)

I'm talking about something I saw with my own eyes, not something I heard or read in a book. WLP is not an ordinary person, but what you read in anatomy books doesn't apply even to an ordinary cultivator of some experience. E.g., they tell you an adult can't voluntarily move the muscles between the ribs. I can. They tell you the skull bones are fused together in an adult. They aren't in a healthy one -- the fusing-together is pathological. They used to write in all medical books that mercury is a natural constituent of human bones -- for hundreds of years -- well that's because mercury-based Calomel was as often given to patients by physicians since Paracelsus as aspirin today. And so on. Everything in our anatomy books is the outcome of our "life sciences" having been studied exclusively on corpses and dead tissues, on static parts separated from the dynamic whole and from the process of living. Don't trust them. They are experts who, as Alan Watts put it, "study birdsong from a collection of stuffed nightingales."

I voted "very important." It is a well-publicized fact that people consciously use less than 5% of thier brain; it is a less known fact that most of the brain is comprized of representations from the organs of the body, and most of one's mind communicates with one's own body rather than with anything on the outside. If all of this communication is happening on the level of the unconscious, that's the extent of conscious mind one has: close to none at all! The neocortex concocts stories, but without these stories connecting consciously to the stories the body is telling, they are just a bunch of fairy tales. Reality lies within. Wang Liping (from whom I learned a wuxing practice aimed at clearly discerning and qi-moving one's inner organs as the first step to any energy manipulations) says that in most modern people, their own inner organs are beyond clear perception and are sort of lumped together into an indistinct blob, everything stuck together. An inner mess instead of a beautiful and meaningful universe. He demonstrated some martial advantages of having a distinct picture and voluntary control of this universe by asking one of his students to punch him in the liver, as hard as he could. He pushed his liver out to make it clearly visible under the rib cage, and the student aimed a fast hard punch there, but by the time of the contact, WLP had moved his liver up all the way into his armpit and hid it there, so the punch landed where there were no organs to damage, just an empty space. He showed it a few times, with his liver and his kidneys. He moves them the way you and I move a hand -- consciously and with precise control. Which means he can strike with the liver or with a kidney in a martial situation too -- that's the true meaning of the taiji maxim "the whole body is a hand," i.e. you can't make contact with a vulnerable spot that won't strike back anywhere on the body. Or of Laozi's "death can't penetrate anywhere, because they're empty." These are not empty words -- applied to MA, they are instructions... for learning what your body is and what it is capable of. I have a strong aversion to any and all philosophies and religions that promulgate disdain for the body, whether openly or implicitly. In fact, to me it's a huge red flag, an indicator of these systems' origin in the agenda of the exploiting overlords: if the masses are taught that their bodies don't matter, it's a prerequisite for breeding slaves who will gladly embrace slavery on religious or philosophical grounds. Which is exactly what happened, historically speaking.

and so it goes whenever Homer feels like teaching Lisa: "Lisa: Dad, don't you think you're overreacting? Homer: Don't you think you're underreacting? Lisa: This conversation is over. Homer: This conversation is under. Lisa: Goodbye. Homer: Badbye." Well, Lisa usually feels frustrated after one of these, and me -- I feel stupid for getting myself into one of these. So -- does it ever happen to anyone else, and what do you do about it?

edit: Great post, Creation! ( and great conversation, Crane! -- pardon my accidental mis-attrubutuion. I didn't mix up the two of you, just the names. ) I turn all mushy when people actually behave as conscious beings. Of course "know thyself" is a prerequisite. As a Hindu sage once put it, you can't transcend what you don't know. As for a personal story I deleted, it's just that I realized I placed it in a wrong context, is all. This, by the way, is a posting problem of mine... I might talk about me more than necessary sometimes, but I also have stories for which there's no "right" context. Since to me all my stories are just one story, some of them sometimes seep where I didn't intend them to... Certain ones... the ones I know as universal rather than personal truths because some access to some universal truths is part of my personal story -- but.. see how it sounds? What will the most likely reaction be if I make a peep, whether explicit (god forbid) or merely inferrable, about having had some very close encounters with some universally applicable truths of a very difficult kind?.. "How dare you?!" "Universal truths?... Meow for yourself, your truths have no merit in my world! Woof! Woof!!" So if I catch myself writing something that I know will be perceived as far-fetched or far out in most worlds (and yet I'm not a far-out person, I've just traveled far out in some far-out directions and brought back some weird souvenirs) , then I might delete. (I'm not as bad as Winpro though -- his motto is "I destroy all I create" -- but then, his stories are farther out than mine! ) Didn't you mention two feet of snow you just had to shovel? and you think you "shudder" because of my subtle power?