PLB

What does it mean to feel? The answer is obvious in terms that we all feel things. The separation of sensations is something that is often considered a given. The separation of the senses as their own thing is a pretty good given. But their separation is not given to us. We have to do something to pay attention to the difference. The question being asked about feeling qi is wrapped around by other questions. We don't own our sensations.

I hear Krishnamurti on this matter as not providing an explanation but delivering a challenge. In many places, he calls on the listener to "think for themselves." He offers examples of what that is not like but doesn't tell you what to think when you are the thinker. The approach to a limit is the provocation. But it doesn't work unless one is actually approaching a limit.

One thing that really stuck with me after reading Buber is his focus on hatred as a kind of intimacy. Not the opposite of love seen as a process of connection but similar as an approach or hope for exclusivity. From that observation, I see the question as what is the Dao in relation to intensely felt connections?

Great question. If I had a daily connection with a great teacher, I would definitely just roll with that until it filled my cup. I am largely stuck with myself a lot of the time, though. One benefit to the martial element is that it is a context to meet other people who can let you sense what you don't have yet. The experience by itself may not give one a clue of how to proceed but the proximity is important. I didn't really believe a lot of things were possible until someone did them to me.

The idea of karma doesn't make sense if one doesn't accept the idea of multiple life experiences. That idea expresses many things and conditions. One of those expressions has to be something like: A balance that is always restored is the acceptance that such a model exceeds the scope of a single lifetime. I don't accept those conditions as a matter of faith nor reject the proposition as a claim of what the real is. Pretty strange place to live in where radically different understandings of what is going on fit widely different experiences. I know I am not helping, really. Thank you for your patience.

Maybe the problem doesn't have a solution. That is not to say that a combination of observation and method cannot be helpful in walking a tightrope over a difficult situation. Knowledge is power and decisions made with knowledge are obviously better than the other kind. But when I look at this question from the precarious location of what supports my existence, I am not sure what it would even mean to say that I exist independently from the people around me.

There are many conflicting currents in the approval we seek. I don't look at it as an object of desire but something that has been removed in the course of an exchange. The power momentarily given to the other is not the subtraction experienced. The two processes are entangled but are not two sides of one coin. I could refuse to make the exchange with any other and still subtract from myself. The desire to be free from the evaluation is itself an appeal to be given value.

Sometimes engagement is not engagement. Sometimes withdrawal is not withdrawal. People do all kinds of strange things and it is your responsibility to sort it out and try to act or not act on the basis of your observations. Since so much is dependent upon what is seen and heard, what is seen and heard? What am I watching and what have I heard? The poverty of action is not a reflection upon the power of action. It is about the limits of perception and communication.

I don't have the skill to claim the matter can be decided by anything I have observed but I have had the good fortune of seeing the Chen and Yang side by side (and in front of me in sparring matches) and what strikes me is how the styles break down components in different ways. The differences are interesting. I am pretty sure that there is no form above all others. The people I see getting the furthest are not concerned with forms for their own sake. All the teachers who have looked at my progress point to what is most lacking. It is not a correction of something I am doing.

In regards to the laziness idea, it is much more work to let things play out and hold back. It is a terrible idea in many ways. All the places one could have intervened and changed things. But there is the rub. What is being changed because I acted to change them? The question is not a rhetorical submission to fate but comes from seeing how things come down over and over again. We should act and respond with great energy when the thing is clear. But so many things are not like that. The certainty we march out with tramples something never understood. We have these enormous feet.

Having put many stones into walls, I tend to look at the expression as an emphasis upon the tactile. Aristotle spoke of the soul as starting with the sense of touch. For Aristotle, the act of representation was an incredible development from that first connection. Is it true? Is our experience of what is not ourselves built up like a series of sensations? And if it is not true, is there an alternative explanation?

The way I read the sentence is that no matter how necessary an action may be from any other perspective, the one being formed is the one who actually undergoes the experience. How much that experience is involved with how laws come about is another question. A big one.

What if there was this element that brought things together but could not be understood the way we speak of most universals because language itself is entangled in our ability/inablility to turn toward it? Or even hope to open ourselves up to such a thing? So, the not being able to talk about it is why it is worth talking about. Whatever it is I am not talking about, it is attractive in a way that needs no decoration. It is not so much that nothing can be said but too much. Like to a lover. See Zhuangzi.

Humans. A lot of ink and blood has been spilt upon the matter. I pass. Maybe that decision just means more ink and blood. But who am I to pronounce judgement?

What one chooses to fight or not fight, at any given point of time, is what shapes the world beyond understanding. It is difficult to be responsible about this sort of thing. But that is what is being called upon to do.