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No Nonsense

"To the question How long do I have? every genetic testing prediction ultimately returns some variant on the same answer: Not long."

-Richard Powers

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The Sheriff (who teaches at a med school) wrote in raking me over the coals for saying that docs have primarily dollar signs in their eyes (yesterday post), claiming that many are dewy-eyed young'uns who merely truly want to help others. Well, (although in my personal opinion the best way to help anybody is to leave them alone) she's probably right. It was an unfair blanket statement! I wasn't myself, I was a bit under the weather, had the sniffles (no not Avian sniffles nor Swine sniffles, don't slam me in an interment camp please bro)  when I wrote that stupid post (I should have qualified it the way Byron Katie does, something like "It's true - but only all the time." AHAHAHA! (I would be slapping my thighs now if cats had thighs)

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I should write sometime about Pranic Healing. That's another stealth alternative healing thing. I say stealth because it doesn't seem to have the internet presence of Matrix Energetics. And for sure, the PH teaching seminars do nowhere near the box office of ME. I mean ME packs 5 to 6 hundreds butts-in-seats, filling a large hotel ballroom, every single time dozen times a year depending who/how you count, while the many PH classes I attended (admittedly 5 years back or so) would have a few handfuls of students. So in terms of marketing it's no contest. Richard is just that much more charismatic than Stephen Co (the main USA-based Pranic Healing teacher, at least back in the day when I did it). 

But what is Pranic Healing in the first place? Well in many ways it is just another minor variant of the usual energy healing thing, like Quantum Touch, Reiki, etc. In fact many PH attendees were already Reiki "Masters" (Reiki's pioneering use of this term Master for anybody who shelled out sufficient seminar bux was a brilliant stroke of marketing but has resulted in Masters littering the ground knee-deep like an autum leaf pile). 

For some reason I was bedazzled enough by PH that I took their training in the following sub-disciplines:

• Basic Pranic Healing
• Color Pranic Healing
• Advanced Pranic Healing
• Crystal Pranic Healing
• Emotional Pranic Healing
• Psychic Self-Defense
• Arhatic Yoga

The best was the first two: Basic and Color. For anybody who already knows some form of energy healing they might be redundant, but I found it to be a good generally workable system that covers all the more or less universal basics that everybody, all these systems, seem to pretty much agree on. The various competing systems do their marketing differentiation more in the esoteric upper reaches. These two first courses were generic and good in that sense.

The rest of the courses got increasingly nutso-New-Agey (from my limited Neanderthal perspective) and I finally drifted away. It gets more and more churchy, borderline cultish, as you get more into it. Though I mean that only in the intellectual sense, the material per se. Operationally nobody ever threw me in a van or drove me to a weekend retreat to repeatedly sing "When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin' Along" til I broke. 

As far as actual healing, I never witnessed anything very dramatic. Usual faith-healing "Doesn't it feel better now?" type of stuff. However, I have found it very effective for SELF healing, particularly of headaches and joint/bone/tendon types of muscular-skeletal injuries.

Co was alright. What finally put me off them for good was the Arhatic Yoga course, taught by their grand Poobah Himself, GRANDMASTER Choa Kok-Sui. I felt the guy was overly pompous. But maybe he really was (now deceased) some kind of super universal meta-master, who the hell knows. But I didn't like the vibe at all. That's when it really began to feel churchy (but that's just me).

Anyway, I do reach for the Pranic Healing basic method as the first item in my alt.med toolkit whenever I need to fix something on myself. That or G-Jo which I've already covered. But I don't use all the salt and special holy water spray bottle and all the goopy PH protocol. I just brush with basic energy and basic color palette.

Exchange Rate

Meaningless, but with consequences.

- Stephen Elliott

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Everything is money, money is everything. That goes without saying. What's interesting is that we all have to pretend otherwise. Otherwise what? Otherwise we won't get any fucking money!

Consider an advertisment featuring a lovely shapely model draped over a car hood or wrapped around a bottle of whiskey or whatever. She smiles at you falsely. The smile is false because it is meant to be attributed to the quality of the car or the booze, which the viewer knows perfectly well she doesn't give a shit about. Yet the smile could be genuine. It is genuine in a sense, but it's a smle for the money she'll be paid. That would trigger a true smile without the photo session coming in between the model and her money. But if she smiles only for what she actually wants (the pay) there won't be any pay.

Therein lies the silly irony at the heart of the human earth-plane system.

If a doctor shows direct interest in what really holds his mind (paycheck), the patients will feel his lack of proper pretense and shun him - resulting in no paycheck! So he has to feign interest in medicine. And so on. Pastors have to pretend to care about your soul, educators have to fake a passion for the next generation, and what not.

There simply is no percentage in openly declaring a passion for money per se. Despite $ being all anyone really cares about. Oh I know, I know. I know you are thinking of some stereotype Wall St. player, supposedly they can nakedly and publicly embrace their inner money love without care for appearances. But I wonder. Even they need to talk about the thrill or the passion of playing the game, or creative destruction or whatever other bullshit.

Closest you'll come to seeing a raw scream of money love as such would be maybe Microsoft former marketing exec (now CEO) Steve Ballmer's ecstatic exhortation at company-wide meetings: "SHOW ME THE MONEY SHOW ME THE MONEY" A regular monetary Billy Sunday.

Anyway, obviously Fagan had it just right when he said: "In this life one thing counts, in the bank, large amounts."

But that doesn't get us past the iron law of the Human Hologram: Everything is merely a stand-in for something else.

So. What is money a stand-in for? In my opinion, money represents, it's a stand-in for.... pure number. After all DNA is formed with only one operation, one goal which is to convert all matter and energy in the universe into copies of itself. A numerically defined, or at least a numericaly evaluated result. Therefore it's natural that human DNA would devolve into simple number worship pure and simple.

In this sense, it's interesting to consider gold. Gold may seem like a barbarous sideshow in this time of electronic keystroke wealth creation, but gold in many ways remains a special case. When you think of something that is absolutely useless, that is acquired via such awesome jawdropping total fuck-you ecocide - you have to think that money and gold are linked in an unbreakable danza de los muertos.

But I wasn't here to talk about gold. I was here to talk about all the false mediation, all the pretend junk that comes between us and the object of love. All the professions (medicine, law, advertising, military, pharma, entertainment, real estate, education, manufacturing, ... I could go on), activities private and public that we undertake are just fig leaves to spare our eyes the sight.

I know this whole entire post is like so totally Human 101. Sorry! Obvious stuff just hits me so hard sometimes.

FightGrub.com

I've mentioned before here my idea of setting up a comprehensive real fight database. As long as we are going to be so obsessed with inter-personal violence we might as well know what we're talking about. The idea would be to create an online indexed database of fight videos. You know, the Youtube type of crap that you occasionally run across anyway.

But there's no single organized source for this. There are some sites that collect MMA fight videos, but that isn't what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about videos that the site operator (er, me Tabby) has reasonable confidence are probably "real" unstaged cellphone-type vid capture of actual inter-personal violent encounters with intent to harm or kill.

The key thing is the indexing, so people can search by terms like weapons, situation, environment, number of key participants, resolution of incident, and so on. This would be really valuable for martial arts training so that average joes could decide whether what they are learning in their training is statistically relevant or not.

What initiated - Wrist grab initiation? Bear hug? Right looping haymaker? Chest push? And what resolved? Punch? Went to ground? Submission (haha, that shouldn't happen on the street) and son on.

I even bought up the domain www.fightgrub.comto house the database. I could get advertisers and everything. FightGrub means you can "grub around" i.e. search for any kind of fight situation that interests you. Comprehensive profile statistics on the fight collection as a whole would be published on the main page.

Oh well now that I've given away the idea somebody else will steal it and do it I'm sure.

But what they might miss is that the same idea could be applied to text descriptions of "real" fights that meet (meat?) certain criteria. They must be sufficiently detailed, and we must be reasonably confident that they're "true", drawn from actual encounters, non-fiction, not novelistic.

An example would be this scene below, taken from the interesting new book "Tokyo Vice" by an American guy who was a police beat reporter for the Yomiuri biggest newspaper in Japan, for 12 years in Tokyo, the book is Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, by Jake Adelstein.

It's hard to think when you can't breathe. It's even harder to think when you can't breathe because a yakuza bruiser has you pinned against the wall, with one hand around your neck and the other hand punching your ribs and your feet are dangling off the floor... THe eight-fingered, badly tattooed, pock-faced giant bouncer at the door grabbed me and pulled me outside and into the entranceway, where he started beating the shit out of me. I wasn't holding my own very well. In fact, I was thinking that I would probably be dead very soon and that this wasn't how I wanted to check out of the world.

Much as in my early days, I was still a terrible martial artist. Even though I had since studied both karate and aikido, I had not talent for forms or kata or anything at all. The highest compliment my karate teacher ever gave me was "You do everything wrong, your stance is awful, your form is terrible, and your movements are sloppy - but often, because you grasp the underlying principles, what you do ... it works. It baffles me."

I didn't really have much time to think about what wonderful escoterics wrist lock would get my opponent's hands off my neck so I could breathe. It was while I was thinking about breathing that I recalled what my old aikido teacher, who was a cop, had once told me was the most effective aikido move of all. It's effective because even the biggest man in the world can't survive without taking in oxygen.

I stiffened my fingers and jabbed him repeatedly in the little indentation under the larynx as hard as I could, rapid-fire. It was basic atemi. There was a nice tactile sensation of puncturing fleshy tissue, and he fell back. Now I could breathe.

He couldn't breathe; he started gagging and fell to his knees. While he was down there I curled my hands into half shells and smash-clapped them over both of his ears as hard as I could. This is called a happa-ken, or "the rupturing fist". In theory, it's supposed to break a person's eardrums, throw off their balance, induce nausea, and cause him great pain. In practice, it seemed to work.

He moaned and rocked back. I kicked him in the face and then ran out of the place as fast as I could and kept running all the way to Ikebukuro station, where I hopped a cab and told the driver to take me to Roppongi.

What had saved my ribs was a boha vest. An antiknifing vest. If you're going to get killed in Japan, you're more likely to be stabbed to death than shot.

Touch my Body

The brash athleticism of boxing can be enjoyable. I don't deny that. Their style of movement is plain fun.

Yesterday there was a new foreigner in the club. He is a professional body guard and security/door guy here, with lots of martial arts and sports background. Younger than me and would be a heavyweight in the ranks (~200 lbs). We sparred some rounds and even though he was good I am a lot faster so I didn't have trouble. If he hit me it might have been very unpleasant were I not just that whisker off his connection path each time. Fun.

Yet at the same time, boxing is never fun. I mean the sparring part always leaves me with a bad aftertaste. That's because there can pretty much be only two configurations as you spar - either you are better than him, you are hitting him at will, he can't connect - or alternatively, he's hitting you at will and you can't connect. It's rare to have a totally even match in these casual club style pairings. And the irony is that either way I end up feeling bad.

The one result is straightforward - I feel bad cause I'm getting the shit kicked (er, punched) out of me. The other result may be twisted or is it  just me, but I end up feeling bad for dominating and hitting the guy, causing pain, embarrassment or whatever. Yes I know. No point in lecturing me about it's all merely learning and sportsmanship and all that. Of course I know all that perfectly well.

I've always had this problem since right out of the starting gate. First time I ever sparred, in our antedeluvisn san shou / san da Kung Fu class in the 70's, the guy was good but when he threw out a high roundhouse at my face by raw instinct I slipped it and grabbed his foot as it whooshed past. I held it for just a nanosecond but enough for him to lose balance and WHAM he hit the the linoleum floor head first slamming the back of his head. Unconsciousness. Blood. Milling around. Ambulance called....

It took me a while to recover from that. I felt indescribably horrible. And in all the years of messing around since, I can't stand to cause any pain or potential injury. But of course that mentality doesn't stack up in these martial sports. Does not compute.

Why do people (males?) have this violent streak? Anyway I practice Tai Chi with the single obsessive goal of achieving absolute invincibility, meaning imperviousness to any assault (fist, stick, knife, bullet, buckshot, Taser, pepper, tear gas, flame thrower, RPG, IED, nuke bomb, neutron bomb, or anything else the humans in their madness may decide to throw at me.

The only high purpose of Tai Chi is to temper yourself into something like the Silver Surfer or Dr. Manhattan!

Remote Goat

Here's a story about Glenn Wheaton, the ex-Army remote viewing master.Worth reading, and seeing the movie. In the TMI Remote Viewing class, Atwater showed us a private film of Wheaton's unspeakably awesome RV powers. The most jaw-dropping exhibition of pure RV mastery I ever saw in years of poking at this subject. Actually I am a member of his Hawaii Remote Viewer Guild. I think Wheaton's RV training protocol is the best, at least that I currently know of.

I suppose James Randi can probably duplicate and debunk the remote goat-killing expert (RG?) also mentioned in the movie (and the book it's derived from which of course I read a long time ago).

That's Definitely It

I'm going to write about Michael Jackson. You have been warned. I don't blame you if you run screaming from the blog.

You may be Jackson'ed out for this incarnation. Every magazine cover for months. Yet I have to say, the documentary of MJ's final prep's for This Is It is a really striking, movie, fascinating, and one highly enjoyable experience. It's good. He's good. You would hardly think this guy's on his last legs and just a drugged up skeleton going through the motions. Which is what I assumed going into it.

But that's not at all the case. No matter how cheesily you may regard the King of Pop, there's no denying he had that very rare superstar charisma that magnetizes your eyes.

More than that, he was a body person. They talk about different kinds of intelligence, like math and music and social and so on. One of those is kinetic intelligence. MJ was the King of Kinetic Intelligence. (Not saying he lacked other kinds intelligence, his musical sense seems to be superb, the pop songs he authored are mostly brilliant, and he sure ended up with a lot fatter bank roll than me. So there were a lot of different kinds of intelligence bundled up in that guy.)

In his extreme kinetic genius I could only compare him to maybe Bruce Lee. Yet he seemed to have, at least in this flick, an other-worldly gentleness, expressed in beautiful hand gestures. Very instructive.

There's a cute scene in TII, where the ongoing dialog between the left-brained show director Ken Ortega and MJ (only the musicians, dancers, director, grips, and MJ himself are present in the huge rehearsal auditorium that is the scene for the entire movie) crystallizes as follows:

MJ: You need to change the scene without using that cue.

KO: Yes, ok, but Michael, the problem with that is, how will you know when the backdrop has switched over?

MJ: I'll feel it.

In another segment, MJ halts the music in the middle of a number and complains, something like

MJ: I can't do this, it feels like pounding, a fist in my ear, hitting me pounding me. I love you, I love you all but I can't do this it's like a fist slamming my ear...

KO: Ok, Michael, I hear you, we're going to take care of this. But you need to tell me, is it the levels? The mix? What?

MJ: It's like a fist hitting me over and over, I love you but I can't do this...

Hard to convey the cuteness of these Left vs. Right brain exchanges in flat words, go see the film, it's really sweet. The interesting thing is that with all his soft gentelmanly demeanor, he was every inch the Boss of the production throughout. (Even if you are totally MJ'ed-out, if you have even the slightest interest in team building or management theory, I suggest you watch TII.)

The young dance troupe is far more athletic than MJ in their dancing. They are all highly skilled. Yet no matter how great, none of them have that certain something. As Bruce Lee put it best: "Emotional content!"

Feed your Head

I've always been able to do Ashtanga's Jump Back move pretty well. It seems to be hard for a lot of people, many use blocks or can't do it even with blocks. So a lot of people kind of bounce their weight off their toes as they go back. A 2-stage weight transfer in effect.

Well I never had those probems, I could always do a good Jump Back almost from the start.

But I had terrible problems with the inverse complement motion, the notorious Ashtanga Jump Through. This is even harder. But strange to me that I had so much trouble with it, given that I can do a fairly elegant version of the 1-legged Jump Through as the intro to Triang Mukha Eka Pada. Yet the 2-legged version has eluded me. Til now.

Because my bud Tiffany posted a great Jump Through teaching vid on her Yogini's Quest site! Just watching this vid gave my body the trick. So this morning I was able to do it, with just the barest zepher of a toe-brush whisper as I swing past. Fun.

Here is the direct vid.

And here is the same guy showing the Jump Back, if you are still having problems with that:

Oh, and by the way, any Tai Chi structure-geeks and posture-Nazis who may be reading this, when you can personally do these as shown in the vids, then and only then can you even begin to lecture me about anything physical/postural/structural all that physicalized pseudo-Tai Chi crap that ya'll so profitably espouse.

Not that this has anything to do with Tai Chi whatsoever. But that's my whole point about physicality - it's irrelevant! But for those of you who love to bleat about the physical structural postural tensegrity or whatever, well - step to the beat!

Having this degree of body control is the pre-requisite for you to even get in the door to take a number and sit in the rear of the room reading tattered back issues of Sports Illustrated til your ticket is called up to the counter and you might then get 5 mins to talk to me about anything physical. That's where the bar is set.

Limitless Undying Love

I've gotten rehooked on Ashtanga, as I said. Even after it injured me... I love it but it doesn't love me...*sob*

Albeit, I admit, I have to jerry rig some of the nastier stuff like my faked up pseudo version of Suptakurmasana for example, with knees a bit raised... Pseuptakurmasana...

But thing is, it's got me in a python grip. For example, I took a (psuedo) Moon Day yesterday, after like 9 straight days of Primary every morning, and I ended up feeling like shit the whole day. I did stagger over to the boxing gym but could barely wheeze my way to the end of my normal 5 rounds of speed rope warmup.

* * *

Interesting book: Fool's Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets, and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett. An excellent history of the recent derivatives debacle. Hammers the point home as if we need any convincing that the biggest baddest ass institutions in the world baptized essentially off-track betting as supposedly high tech financial innovation.

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There are some really beautiful human hearts in this world. Kids, teens, seniors, lovely ladies and helpful guys, people with all kinds of artistic, social, intellectual, and spiritual gifts, or even just a soul-melting smile. And yet every one of those occupies an eco-niche that was species-scraped and ethnic-cleansed by some hard-ass forebears who just killed every single thing that didn't shoot them first. All that niceness is built directly on hidden bone and blood. And their lives are maintained only by the constant ongoing undying pressure of unrelenting violence and pain. There's the horror of it.

T 12

T 12: Tabby Cat's Top Twelve Tai Chi Teachings

I'm thinking of writing training an ebook. I'll reveal the fundamental, practical training secrets of Tai Chi.

Sample (partial) chapter list:

1. The Fundamental Training Secret (Form)
2. The Fundamental Training Secret (Push defense)
3. The Fundamental Training Secret (Push offense)
4. Secret of the 4-Oz Push
5. Sparking Electric Hands
6. Steel-Cable Arms: One Sword Drill to Rule Them All
7. Bone Marrow Ward Off
8. Reverse Vector Training
9. Mystery Topic
10. Mystery Topic
11. Additional Commentary A
12. Additional Commentary B

Considering my decades of hard-scrabble Tai Chi experience, and the buckets of blood, sweat, tears, and cold cash that the above Final Distillation has cost me over a lifetime, (not to mention the 24K literary value of the writing itself) a price point of 1,000 USD would be giving it away. Especially when you reflect that I charge only 40 USD / 1-hour private lesson.

Nevertheless, probably it will be priced as 19.95 USD, available on this blog site only. It will be style-independent, but with a recommendation for the un-styled.

Bite me

Now as they rode thus through the forest together, Merlin said to the King: "Lord, which wouldst thou rather have, Excalibur, or the sheath that holds him?" To which King Arthur replied, "Ten thousand times would I rather have Excalibur than his sheath." "In that thou art wrong, my Lord," said Merlin, "for let me tell thee, that though Excalibur is of so great a temper that he may cut in twain either a feather or a bar of iron, yet is his sheath of such a sort that he who wears it can suffer no wound in battle, neither may he lose a single drop of blood."

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Isn't it pathetic the way Western students and teachers of Tai Chi have given up on the essence of the art? Now they're all structure geeks and posture Nazis. They're firm believers in bone, muscles, tendon, ligaments... such material boys!

But that's not Nature's Way. That's not the real Tai Chi. Oh sure there are a few physical foundational points for beginners. The Five Principles are listed  here. But to fuss obsessively with all that anatomical and postural structural crap is to take the finger for the moon. It's like if you went for pilot flight training and they spent the whole 6-month course showing you how to fasten your seatbelt in just the absolutely aesthetically optimal way, or sit just so in the pilot's chair so your butt looks cute from behind... Fuck that, let's get it on doing what we came for.

Which is energetics. You might say then why not just go with Qi Gong. Sure, except the Qi Gong whatever system isn't as good an energy gusher as Tai Chi - properly done. Tai Chi includes all of Qi Gong but the reverse doesn't hold.

I was working with a new private student the other day. He learned Tai Chi form and push hands from a senior person under the lineage of a famous master in Singapore. Of course this guy's body was full of unconscious tension, as always the case. I asked him, since you learned the whole form, how often do you practice it? ... Well... I kind of stopped for a while... been busy... BUZZ.! Wrong answer in tthat whenever I hear that I know they've been practicing wrong, in fact that they were never taught correctly in the first place. [Though why anyone would want to study under an obnoxious scumbag like Tabby is a question that would drive Freud himself to madness. - Tabby Cat owner comment]

When you learn it right and practice it right, NOTHING wlll keep you from practicing it. You'll be like a well-conditioned rat pressing the sugar button over and over.  It feels so good it's like you wouldn't give up eating. Or  a heroin addict wouldn't give that up, granted a free infinite supply with no narks breathing on his neck, would he? Well that's what Tai Chi is. Uncut China White.

I've often said the Feds would make Tai Chi illegal if they knew how ecstatic the pure energy feels - when ya do it right. But since most people do it wrong, the Feds don't know and Tai Chi is not yet a Schedule One entry. 

I'm sure you know the Gita quote:

If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty one...

Yeah. Well. That's what it is. The Tai Chi energy when it permeates you. So when I hear that old line "I've kinda slacked off lately..." then I don't even need to touch the person's body to know they haven't got a damn thing.

Not surprising. Everybody nowadays wants to look good, show off their muscles, have a ramrod goose-steppy robotically correct posture. That though is not Nature's Great Way. You don't get it by grabbing more stuff, adding more to yourself. You get it by shedding and subtracting. But we CANNOT COMPUTE this idea, so all the former Tai Chi people are feverishly training up other things, anything, like Zhan Zhuang or clubbells or Swiss balls or any other thing as long as it isn't boring old Tai Chi. But I can't blame them. Since they were never correctly taught, it's natural they would turn away.

As the bard put it so well:

And give to dust, that is a little gilt,
More laud than gold o'er-dusted.

- Troilus and Cressida, Act_ iii. _Sc_. 3.

As for me though just as Tesshu Yamaoka said about his Zen practice, I'll stick with it even when it's come down to me as the last person on Earth doing the real shit.

And the point of it all? Besides just feel-good? It is only this, alas still far distant:

刀槍不入

(If unsure of the meaning, see top of this post)