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Author Topic:   Is there a life energy?
dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
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(3)
Message 4 of 87 (656777)
03-22-2012 3:13 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by goldenlightArchangel
03-21-2012 9:37 PM


Yes, there is a life energy. But what you have written does not describe it at all.
It surrounds us and penetrates us. Flows through us. And with a bit of training, we can harness it and redirect it, giving us power that we cannot get from muscles alone, that we lose when we do try to use our muscles instead of Ki. I do not know how to display the kanji for it, but you can see it here. The Chinese call it "qi", which I've usually seen and heard as "chi", while the Japanese call it "ki". The flow of Qi in the body is what is being manipulated in acupuncture. English translations include "mind", "spirit", "life energy", all of which fall short of expressing the concept. George Lucas borrowed it as "The Force", but added on many other attributes that distract the public.
In the Japanese martial art of Aikido ("The Way of Harmonizing Ki" -- the art has diversified greatly in the past decades; what I had studied emphasized Ki techniques and Ki development), we learned to strengthen our own Ki through exercises and the Four Principles (stay relaxed; maintain your center; weight on the under-side; extend your mind). All the warm-up movements used those Four Principles, as did all our techniques. If you have one of the Four Principles, you have all four. If you lose one, you lose them all. With Ki, you can make yourself too heavy to be lifted, make your arm unbendable, make your forefinger and thumb incapable of being separated, "throw" a much stronger opponent (actually, the technique is to lead the attacker to fall), literally flip an attacker in the air, "throw" attackers without ever coming in physical contact with them. All while being relaxed. Going through obstacles by extending my mind through them. Redirecting my momentum by switching which direction I was extending my mind; in school, I would run into a closing elevator that only had room for one more person and as soon as I hit my spot I pivoted, switching the direction of my mind, and completely stopped my motion (though it scared the hell of those behind me who expected me to come crashing through them).
Funny true story: A Seventh-Day Adventist on CompuServe back in the day made a practice of copying creationist books verbatim and posting those regurgitations, "answering" all responses with yet more verbatim regurgitations. When I was finally able to force him to write his own stuff, all he did was to try to convert me. The final straw for him was when he listed all the incredible physical feats his sect's founder, Ellen G. White (uncomfortably close to the name of my ex-wife, AKA "The Spanish Inquisition"). She would fall into a deep trance and, guess what. She could make herself too heavy to be lifted (a frail old woman). She could extend her arm and nobody could bend it. She could place her thumb and forefinger together and nobody could separate them. I replied that when I was in practice I could do all those very same things and much, much more and I never once had to go into any kind of a trance to do any of that. He suddenly had very urgent business to rush off to attend to ... and he was never again seen on CompuServe, that I know of.
The whole idea of the self-defense techniques is that the attacker (referred to as the "nage") is extending his Ki towards the defender (AKA "uke"), so the uke's task is to blend his Ki with that of the nage's, making them one with one center, which the uke makes his own center, thus throwing the nage off-center and powerless against the movement of the new whole about the new center, the uke's. Ideas behind blending include connecting and "taking the slack out", which is part of forming the connection, as well as moving from the center. OK, perform this experiment with another person. Take something like a short rope or a belt (in class, because everybody wore a gi, we would simply use somebody's belt). One person (the uke, I guess) holds one end of the belt and the other, the nage, holds the other. Let the belt be slack. Now have the uke try to move the nage through that belt. A point will be reached where the belt suddenly snaps taut and the uke's motion stops and is not transferred to the nage, who suffers nothing except perhaps a mild case of whiplash. Now, have the uke move back until the belt is taut -- that is "taking out the slack". Now have the uke move and, because he is now connected to the nage, his motion will transfer to the nage and the nage will have to move.
Another part of the techniques is a bit more pragmatic. Some of our exercises involved being locked in a grip from which we needed to free ourselves. Now obviously, in an actual situation, we would have blended our Ki's and our motions and would have acted far before finding ourselves in this kind of a situation. But the normal sequence of events would allow us to blend with the nage's motion and use it. These exercises forced us to re-initiate the motion, as well as to overcome the mental barriers of that deathly grip on our wrist. The nage has our wrist gripped firmly and overwhelmingly strongly with both his hands. If we try to move it towards him, he will resist. If we try to move it away from him, he will resist. If we move it at right angles between us, then he is powerless to resist; if the uke offers no resistence, then the nage cannot offer any resistence. Now the next part of the exercise. Our wrist is firmly gripped by both the nage's hands. So how do we move our wrist? By not moving the wrist. If we try to move the wrist, then our mind stops at the wrist and we are trapped. What's the Fourth Ki Principle? Extend the mind (AKA "extend Ki", AKA extend all possible incomplete definitions of Ki). Don't move the wrist, but rather move your finger (the index finger works well here). You are extending your Ki out through your finger and when your finger moves, then so does the rest of the hand and the wrist and the arm and the body that's attached to that arm.
Here's another exercise which I found rather interesting. The nage has the uke grasped firmly and inescapably with both hands on both wrists. After taking the slack out (thus blending the nage's Ki to the uke's), the uke moves into the nage. The left hand remains level, as if it's traversing the top of a table. The right hand it following its index finger that has started moving up towards a cascading over the nage's head. The nage's mind is now divided between the uke's two hands: the uke's left hand moving the nage's entire body backwards off his center and the uke's right hand directing the nage's mind upwards, taking his weight off the under-side, and over the top, leading the nage into a fall. And if the uke at any point tries to muscle his way through this, he will immediately fail. It is all accomplished through the flow of Ki, through the flow of life energy, through The Force.
Admittedly, I have in the past decade-plus made more mundane use of Ki. I really didn't get introduced to music until around the age of 14 when my family finally bought a record player. Close to the same time (circa 1965; Rubber Soul), popular music also became listenable for me. But then circa 1972 with the "50's Revival" fueled in part by the play, "Grease", I found popular music to have stagnated, whereupon, courtesy of then-Walter (now-Wendy) Carlos' "Switched-on Bach", I switched over to "classical" music (from a Garrison Keillor "Prairie Home Companion" commercial, "Classical music lovers believe that the only good musician is a dead musician ... and the longer the better!"). I was a listener, who listened to everything going on in the music, but there was no physical connection so I would sit motionless. Later, I heard a woman complain about people attending concerts who just sat there motionless, which to her meant that they weren't enjoying the music so why were they there? I explained to her that they are listeners and shared what that means. My ex-wife was a life-long dancer (though clueless about partner dancing) who could never sit motionless to music, but there was so much that she never would listen to nor could hear (eg, an ironic twist to the lyrics of an Irish song she would dance to, but never listen to the words, while a listener hears all).
So then, when I met my ex, I had never learned to dance. So she "tried to teach me", by which she did nothing other than to tell me "just listen to the music and do what it tells you to do." Absolutely worthless. I could hear everything in the music, so just exactly what do I follow? What is the music telling me? Everything, and nothing. In the meantime, I studied music theory, but that discipline's treatment of rhythm is different from what dancers are talking about. And since I could not understand my later-to-be-ex's non-instruction, for the next 25 years she classified me as being completely without rhythm and incapable of ever learning how to dance.
And yet, in the Spring of 2000, I got us both into a salsa class, one which turned out to be intermediate level, but then since learning to dance was supposed to be impossible for me, how could I tell the difference. A co-worker at work had arranged for this teacher to come on-site for these once-a-week lessons and since her work (school teacher) kept her away for a month or two, I started the lessons on my own ahead of time, since I needed all the help I could get. In that very first dance lesson of mine, faced with all these new steps and turnings and the like ... I immediately drew upon my old Aikido warm-up exercises. And in that first dance sequence he taught us there was an inside-turn. Immediately I remembered moving the point of connection at right angles with all other parts of the body that are connected following quite naturally, while I was able to feel the connection throughout the move, knowing to use the connection and the motion and not any kind of muscling through it. And at the end of that very first dance lesson I had ever had in my life, all the women complimented me on my strong and smooth lead.
Three or four years later in Lindy class, tandem Charleston (AKA "shadow Charleston") to be exact, somebody else asked the teacher how much force to use and the answer was to not use force. But I had only half-heard that, so what I heard was, "Don't use The Force." And I nearly cried out, "Don't use The Force? But everything I do depends on using The Force!"
Life Force does exist. Many of us, including Steven Segal (who is the first foreigner to operate an Aikido dojo in Japan), are intimately familiar with that. What you are talking about is completely different.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by goldenlightArchangel, posted 03-21-2012 9:37 PM goldenlightArchangel has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 5 by Kairyu, posted 03-22-2012 4:40 AM dwise1 has replied

dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 6 of 87 (656786)
03-22-2012 5:11 AM
Reply to: Message 5 by Kairyu
03-22-2012 4:40 AM


What we do not understand will seem supernatural.
What I experienced is very real and has been experienced by many others. Our mind-set (relaxed, centered, weight underside, Ki extended) is a definitely a factor.
Around the time of Toshiro Mifune's western movie with Alain Delon and Charles Bronson ("Red Sun", 1971), a fellow Aikidokai discussed Mifune's martial arts techniques in the movie as being completely describable and explainable in terms of modern physics -- sorry, but I do not remember any details.
I have personally experienced Ki and continue to use it (especially since I still dance). If I were to find myself in a self-defense situation, I would naturally use Ki. It is real to me, even though the conceptual basis is in Japanese mysticism. Conceptually, it does seem to be based in the supernatural, but experientially it is something real.
As for my overall philosophy ... . I do not rule out the supernatural arbitrarily. I do rule out our ability to deal with the supernatural. So the supernatural could exist, but we cannot really say anything definitive about the supernatural. Even if some supernatural entity were to exist, I do not allow that any of our fallible human ramblings could truly describe such a supernatural entity's desires and intentions.
But moving from our center works. Moving others through our center and our connection to them does work. Taking the slack out works. Blending motion works. Moving from our center to move others works.
In other words, Ki works.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 5 by Kairyu, posted 03-22-2012 4:40 AM Kairyu has seen this message but not replied

dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 42 of 87 (657821)
03-31-2012 2:21 AM
Reply to: Message 14 by frako
03-22-2012 8:32 PM


WSW24, asked of dwise1 writes:
So I would like to ask Ki is natural of supernatural according to you?
If i may i think its more of an evolved/learned understanding of physics. And controling your body to do a task with the least effort on your part but doing something that seems to require a lot of effort. {etc}
It's not that I really consider Ki to be the supernatural at work, but rather it was the manner in which we thought of what we were doing and visualizing it. And that does most definitely work.
Ki was essential to the language that we used in our techniques and so it is how we communicate about those techniques, even to ourselves. Does not necessarily mean that it's some actual supernatural thing, but that is the language, no less than we speak of the sun rising and setting even though what's actually happening is that the earth is rotating as it goes around the sun.
-Punching trough something that should brake your arm or should be impossible.
Not something that we did. Our style, which in the early 1970's was one of two styles (and Aikido has since then split off into several different styles, some of them much rougher than others; ours was and is one of the most gentle styles). Founded by Koichi Tohei Sensei in 1971, the style is called Shin Shin Toitsu Aikido Kai ("meaning 'the way of realizing the [original] unity of mind and body', but the martial discipline of the art is frequently isolated and referred to as Ki-Aikido, particularly in the Western world") and is run by the Ki Society. In my own training and, as I understand it to still be done 40 years later, the emphasis was on Ki development. Besides the unarmed techniques, we also worked with the bo (a 4-foot staff) and the boken (a practice sword carved out of wood; Aikido's origins was grounded in sword training). But the only punching was as an attack to defend against.
Rather, our basic practice with extending Ki (the fourth of the Four Principles) was to have someone hold their arm out very strong and by extending our mind (one of the translations of Ki) past them they presented no obstacle for us. Another more challenging exercise was for the nage ("attacker") to very strongly clamp both his hands on our (the uke) wrist, holding it fast and immovable. If you think of moving your wrist, then you remain trapped. If you think of moving the tip of your finger, the nage cannot stop you. That is an example of thinking past the obstacle.
-Punching with inhuman force
Not part of our style.
-Making yourself to "heavy" to lift
Centre of gravity we humans can easily shift our centre of gravity to all sorts of positions placing your centre of gravity low and away from your body you can make it significantly harder for someone to lift you.
Yes, we can shift our center of gravity at will. Indeed, in our exercises where our center actually was was completely mental. Though from your description, one would think that the lower we place our center, the heavier we would be. Doesn't work that way. To be centered, our center must be around where the knot of our belt is (your belt buckle, if you aren't wearing a gi). Anywhere else, it doesn't work. For example, we'd center ourselves and sensei would touch our forehead to shift our center there and we'd lose it (remember, have one of the four principles and you have all four; lose one and you lose them all). However, the exact same thing would happen if he touched our toe. Our center had to be centered; a lower center did nothing for us.
-Throwing giant heavy people around like they are made of Styrofoam, again centre of gravity you just have to apply enough force to shift their centre of gravity and let gravity do the rest
or redirect their kinetic energy just enough so they land on their face or a combination of both
Actually, what we did was to blend with the nage's motion and redirect it while moving us both our own (ie, the uke's) center, which by definition meant that the nage was being moved outside his own center. Not only did that mean that we would lead the nage into a fall, but also we would allow him to fall.
Acupuncture
I only mentioned that to inform you that it is Ki (or Qi in Chinese) that the Chinese are talking about in acupuncture. The Japanese Ki version of that is Kiatsu, which uses finger pressure instead of needles.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 14 by frako, posted 03-22-2012 8:32 PM frako has not replied

dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 43 of 87 (657822)
03-31-2012 2:53 AM
Reply to: Message 15 by Panda
03-22-2012 11:12 PM


frako writes:
Making yourself to "heavy" to lift
Centre of gravity we humans can easily shift our centre of gravity to all sorts of positions placing your centre of gravity low and away from your body you can make it significantly harder for someone to lift you.
It is easier than that.
You just need to turn yourself into a 'dead weight'.
An unconscious person is considerably more difficult to lift than a conscious person - unless you use a suitable lifting technique (e.g. a fireman's lift).
You can make yourself almost impossible to lift simply by relaxing your body.
Actually, no.
For one thing, you might be confusing "relaxed" with "limp". Our techniques required us to be relaxed, but we were never limp. If you have ever been able to learn partner dancing, then you would know the difference; if you haven't, then you are so much poorer for that lack.
Just going completely limp is for Ralphie's younger brother when they're being attacked by the yellow-eyed bully: "Randy lay there like a slug! It was his only defense!" That is not in the least bit what we were doing.
Again, the four principles are: relaxed, centered, weight on the underside, extending Ki. We had to maintain all four all the time throughout our techniques. While standing motionless. While moving. While turning. While rolling. All the time. Going limp as you propose would make everything else we did impossible. IOW, you do not know what you are talking about here.
Also, cases where the teacher is pulling tricks is one thing. What I have describe is what all the students would do as a matter of course. We weren't using any tricks. OK, we did have a few tricks. One exercise was to stand stable and difficult to move when being pushed against, and once enough force is applied we could be moved, but we would maintain our balance and control. To help the student achieve that state, we would add a slight downward force to the pushing of our hand to promote weight-underside. And, conversely, we could also apply a slight upward force that would wipe out the student's weight-underside and thus destroy all the other four principles. Similarly, in a common one-hand hold that leads to flipping the nage over in the air with no physical effort on the uke's part (I and many others have done it too many times to count), if the nage simply runs his finger along the top of the uke's arm, that shifts his mind (AKA "Ki") to the upper-side and wipes out his maintaining the four principles.
Again, these are things that all Aikido students have used and experienced. And have nothing to do with what you are talking about.
Here's another situation that I personally experienced. When we rolled, we would extend our Ki by extending our arm (not locking the joints, which would not be extending the arm) and blend with the floor as we went into our shoulder roll. During that time, while I was in college, every day I wasn't in school I was working construction for my father. One day, I was standing astride my El Camino and our dumpster unloading from the El Camino to the dumpster. When I had completed that task, I jumped down to the ground, an asphalt surface. But I caught my pants leg on the dumpster and suddenly I found myself falling head-long towards the ground. This was the kind of fall where both wrists and forearms are shattered as the victim panics and tries to break his fall with his hands. I did not panic during that fall, but rather remained calm. Then as I was about to reach the ground (asphalt surface, in case you have forgotten), I extended my Ki through my arm, blended with the ground, and went into a shoulder roll out of which I emerged without injury.
OK, so just what "trick" that my sensei had staged accounts for that?
In another situation, I was practicing an Aikido move when I accidentally brought my elbow crashing down on a bed post, right on my "funny bone". Instead of hopping around in pain, I remained centered and relaxed and calmly sat down and massaged the injury site.
So which one of his "tricks" was my sensai applying there?
Similarly, decades after my Aikido training, I was being treated for shin splints with a diabolical torture device, a kind of plastic rolling pin with multiple rings on it that she would roll along the length of my shin. As she was about to start, I centered myself and relaxed and moved my weight to the underside. And as I sat there calmly (OK, I was also using a breathing exercise I had learned in Aikido), the therapist was looking at me puzzled because I wasn't screaming in pain.
Again, what was the trick that my sensei was using here, a decade or two after he had died in a car accident?

This message is a reply to:
 Message 15 by Panda, posted 03-22-2012 11:12 PM Panda has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 46 by Modulous, posted 03-31-2012 7:42 AM dwise1 has replied

dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 44 of 87 (657823)
03-31-2012 3:07 AM
Reply to: Message 17 by Panda
03-23-2012 6:15 AM


Re: Dumb TV
I particularly liked the kung fu master that could pull his testicles into his body.
He stood there and went *Hrmph!* "Now feel my crotch!"
Then the presenter felt his crotch and said "Wow! They are not there!"
Then the master went *Hrmph!* "Now they are back!"
Yeah, I've heard about that. Though my sole source is Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice, which I read as soon as it came out in paperback (hey! I was on a kid's budget, so hardcover books were out of the question.). As he described it, sumo wrestlers would practice pulling their testicles back up into their body, though as he described it it took a hot bath and a massage to coax them back out again.
Now, how self-aware are you? Because of the range of temperatures that are needed for the formation of sperm, the male body automatically regulates how far down the testicles are allowed to dangle. When it's hotter, the testicles dangle lower down and when it's colder, they're held closer to the body. The sumo wrestler training that Ian Fleming mentioned appears to be a conscious control over that same physical mechanism. Though what he described does belie that kung fu master's claim, in that coaxing the boys back out takes more than willing it to happen. Unless kung fu masters know something that sumo wrestlers don't.
As for your
I can do this trick too:
"I have a dragon under my left hand!"
*Hrmph!* "Now it is gone! Look!" *turns over left hand*
The ki is strong in this one!
You have no idea what you're talking about. At least when it comes to Ki.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 17 by Panda, posted 03-23-2012 6:15 AM Panda has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 48 by Panda, posted 03-31-2012 6:05 PM dwise1 has replied

dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 49 of 87 (657914)
04-01-2012 5:37 AM
Reply to: Message 46 by Modulous
03-31-2012 7:42 AM


You missed the point of the message.
Panda was claiming that such claims are due to trickery by the martial arts schools' teachers. That is was all nothing but fakery.
While, yes, some fakers have been known to pose as martial arts instructors, that is not the case with Aikido. If the instructor were employing fakery, then only the instructor or others complicit in that fakery could ever be able to perform the tasks that they were faking.
What my message conveyed was that that was decidedly not the case. Indeed, from the very beginning of their training, students were being taught to do the exact same things that their instructors ("sensei", whose Kanji characters mean "previous life", meaning that your teachers had gone through what you are going through now) are able to do. And each of my instances of being able to use my Ki training were intended to demonstrate that what I had learned was not mere deceptive trickery as Panda falsely misrepresented it to be, but rather that it was something that the students were taught and which works! And hence cannot at all be the product of the instructors' "trickery" as Panda would falsely have it to be.
Whether there is indeed such a thing as "Ki" or "Qi" (depending on whether your orientation is Japanese or Chinese) is an entirely separate issue. As I have already allowed freely, the language of Ki is what we were taught and is the way in which we visualize what we are doing; that it could be described differently is recognized and is immaterial to my response to Panda.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 46 by Modulous, posted 03-31-2012 7:42 AM Modulous has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 51 by Panda, posted 04-01-2012 6:21 AM dwise1 has not replied
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 50 of 87 (657917)
04-01-2012 5:58 AM
Reply to: Message 48 by Panda
03-31-2012 6:05 PM


Re: Dumb TV
With all due respect, fully intended in the Woody-Allen sense, you fucking idiot!
Yes, I did identify Ian Fleming's new novel, You Only Live Twice, as the only other source of this claim. Because that was true.
Was I claiming that Ian Fleming was an authority on the matter? Uh, no. All that I was stating was that that was the only other source of such a claim. I would have to assume that he had done at least some minimal amount of research in preparation for writing that novel, which carries with it the assumption that the story of sumo wrestlers being trained to retract their balls to safety had reached him. Of course, it would require further research to verify this claim.
OK, during embryonic development, the gonads originally form within the abdomen and then later, in the males, descend down into the scrotum. The abdomenal wall does not always close up properly in that process, in which case a male will have an inguinal hernia, such as I had on my right side that had to be repaired when I was 10 years old (much later, another kid's inguinal hernias were describe as being "big enough to drive a truck through"). So in the scenario of being able to retract one's testicles into one's body would necessarily be restricted by that sealing up of the abdomenal wall.
OK what I was describing was that there are muscles present and those muscles do regulate the degree of the dangle (not to be confused with the angle of the dangle). And I can personally state, with absolutely no amount of training having been involved, that I am able to draw my own testicles up towards my body by an inch or two. I can consciously draw them up toward my body. And I do not doubt that, were you to attempt it yourself, you would also be able to do the same. The muscles are there. The muscles can be controlled by our minds. And that is all that I was actually claiming.
Of course, all you want to do is to talk through your ass. Which I would think make the ability to retract one's testicles much more important, since otherwise your own scrotum would end up muffling your voice as you talk through your ass.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 48 by Panda, posted 03-31-2012 6:05 PM Panda has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 52 by Panda, posted 04-01-2012 6:38 AM dwise1 has replied

dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 54 of 87 (657983)
04-01-2012 2:39 PM
Reply to: Message 52 by Panda
04-01-2012 6:38 AM


Re: Dumb TV
Just a niggle - but 'new' novel? Published in 1964?
Yes, which is when I read it. Duh?
I would have to be a ki master in front of a gullible student to do that trick.
No gullible students in our dojo. The situation that you describe would be one where the instructor demonstrates something that depends on trickery and promises the students that if they study under him for several years then they too can do it. Dance studios would to do the same thing, sending top dancers out to clubs to wow everybody and then hand out business cards for the studio, but when students signed up they would be taught something different.
But in Aikido that didn't happen. From the very start the instructor taught the students the techniques that he used in his demonstration and the students learned to use those techniques successfully as I already described in Message 43. If the instructor's demonstrations were based on trickery, then that would not be possible unless, like a magician's apprentice, they also employ trickery. That is not the case.
If you insist of continuing to speak through your ass, then do please do something about your breath!

This message is a reply to:
 Message 52 by Panda, posted 04-01-2012 6:38 AM Panda has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 55 by Panda, posted 04-01-2012 4:29 PM dwise1 has replied
 Message 57 by Percy, posted 04-01-2012 7:08 PM dwise1 has replied

dwise1
Member
Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 58 of 87 (658040)
04-02-2012 12:57 AM
Reply to: Message 55 by Panda
04-01-2012 4:29 PM


Re: Dumb TV
I am thinking that your continued puerile ad hominems are due to your embarrassing lack of any actual argument to support your claims.
Boy, that is really rich coming from you! What an idiot! Take a good look in the mirror!
He taught you how to fall over without hurting yourself and then convinced you that it was qi.
He taught you how to not cry out when hurt and then convinced you it was qi.
Congratulations!
It seems you have a religion.
OK, idiot, let's try this one more time.
Magicians do not really use magic, but rather fakery. When somebody learns to do magic, it is absolutely required that they learn the fakery behind each trick. If a magic student really thought they were doing magic and tried to perform a trick depending on the magic being real, he will fail. Are you able to understand that simple concept?
Now consider the case of a phony martial artist performing incredible feats, but by employing fakery. He takes on students promising to be able to teach them to do the same eventually, but he never passes on to any of them how to fake it, what the phony trick is. Without that knowledge, it is impossible to perform any of those incredible feats; only by knowing how to fake those phony feats could any student even hope to repeat said feats. Are you able to understand that simple concept?
In Aikido, we were never taught how to fake the feats that I had described. Nonetheless, we were all able to perform those feats. Had those feats been phony and dependent on fakery, then that would have been impossible. Therefore, those feats were not phony. Are you able to understand that simple logical deduction?
But, no, you will continue to embrace your abject ignorance and to engage in ad hominem attacks. You will continue to speak out your ass, which I understand is the proper term for what you persist in doing.

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 Message 55 by Panda, posted 04-01-2012 4:29 PM Panda has replied

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dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 59 of 87 (658044)
04-02-2012 1:18 AM
Reply to: Message 57 by Percy
04-01-2012 7:08 PM


Re: Dumb TV
No, I cannot. Ki is at best an abstract concept. It is based on a traditional understanding of nature from Chinese and Japanese culture as that concept came to be incorporated in martial training. Its use in Aikido is in communicating how to perform the techniques and in the practitioner knowing what to do. As I have explained repeatedly.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 57 by Percy, posted 04-01-2012 7:08 PM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 61 by Percy, posted 04-02-2012 7:03 AM dwise1 has replied

dwise1
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Posts: 5930
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 62 of 87 (658098)
04-02-2012 10:36 AM
Reply to: Message 61 by Percy
04-02-2012 7:03 AM


Re: Dumb TV
No. For one thing, it cannot be a discussion when all Panda does is to mock and insult. For another, what I have been maintaining is that the techniques taught in Aikido are very real and do indeed work, whereas Panda insists that they are phony and the product of deliberate fraud.
Though you do bring up an interesting question. Both Ki and God can be used by people to explain things that they cannot explain and to provide a paradigm to accomplish things. One difference is that Ki is considered to be a natural part of us and available for our use, whereas God is an external power that acts independently of us and may or may not side with us. Another difference is that Ki techniques still work whether Ki actually exists or not; it really doesn't matter that much to a Ki practitioner. But the question of whether God actually exists is of paramount importance to a God practitioner.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 61 by Percy, posted 04-02-2012 7:03 AM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 69 by Percy, posted 04-02-2012 7:13 PM dwise1 has not replied

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