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.

This is more or less what Descartres said. From the point of view of his "telling the story", there is only telling the story; including the story of "I am." It is a misreading of the text to say that the expression is an axiom regarding the absolute. He embarked on a circular argument to make the absolute necessary with the clear understanding that stopping with just that statement left him with just that statement. Much as you are using the concept of the absolute to make it not necessary.

I can report without qualification that I am sick much less often and don't hurt myself at work any longer. I know there are many other connections but one of the other things that comes from the practice is a reluctance on my part to say for sure what caused what. Your results may vary. Now I am repeating myself.

I guess the quieting of the mind part is a source of displeasure. Not to say that in any kind of authoritative explanation sense but as a report of what interferes with the direct connection you speak of. I suspect people have widely various experiences with this even though they are struggling with the same thing.

I take your point in general about George Washington but would like to point out some ass kicking his troops did in New Jersey after taking Trenton. Those little raids did a lot of damage to the forces opposing him. Very SunTzu

This makes perfect sense and is also very hard to do. What is being described only works in groups if enough of the participants understand what is happening around them. As with the other observations made in this part of the book, it is a hollow bang on the coconut absent a group of people who think a certain way together in real time.

The instruction to not do something is often associated with a closing or constriction. To have it be associated to an opening of possibility and oppurtunity is the opposite of acceptance or passivity. It turns out freedom really messes up how you think about freedom. Nature never promised it would be easy.

The best thing to do doesn't always feel powerful at the time. I suffer the feeling of inadequacy you speak of during job interviews despite over 35 years of experience in my trade. I have come to realize that I won't ever be the master of those moments. But I have learned to not accept the corner I been placed in when I am placed in a corner. It has become more important to approve of what I am saying to myself than prove it to other people. This quality has a power in situations that one can't own in the moment. So one lets go of something by taking hold of another thing. In other words, the other people are pretending to be more attached than they can possibly be. One doesn't have to challenge the force of that directly to bring it into question.

Maybe you are not asking about a technique or method.

Depends on the hub; Lives on the circumference; What is this strange thing?

dancing on and on, my hand caught yours on the fly; turning us around