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Han Jingchen Seminar Report (Part 1)

I was browsing an interesting article in a Japanese martial arts magazine about another Yiquan teacher (not one of the Yao brothers). I thought I might as well type it in as a translation, just to prove I'm not totally parochial when it comes to Yiquan - there are other genotypes of Yiquan out there besides the Yao brothers version. This Japanese martial arts magazine reporter attended a seminar by Chinese Yiquan Master Han Jingchen, son of Wang Xiangzhai's student Han Xingqiao. Master Han teaches quite a lot in Japan, has a Japanese website. If you prefer to read him in Chinese, here's an article where he talks about his approach to Yiquan. Maybe I'll translate that sometime too,who knows, who cares.

But anyway this article translation text got to be too long for a single post. So this is just the first 2 or 3 pages. I'll post up the rest of it when/if I feel like it. Meanwhile, enjoy or move on. And always remember the Primary Dictum of Tabbycat Thought:

If you don't like how I do it, do it yourself.

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One Solution from Chinese Martial Arts

First Hand Report by Yoshinori Kohno

Reprogram Movement at the Unconscious Level

Aiming Toward the Perfectly Natural Body

Is This the Ultimate Martial Art?

Mongolian People’s Sense of Distance

It was already more than 20 years ago now, in China’s Xi’an city airport I had to change planes. With more than two hours to kill, the airport waiting area was crowded and there were people with nowhere to sit. I was the only Japanese person. Among the travelers, one group in particular that seemed to have been there a while caught my eye. Each one of them was occupying 4 adjacent seats, sprawled out, pillowing on their luggage spread out all around them. Every one of them was lying as comfy as though in his own bed, each with his mountain of baggage heaped under and around himself. They didn’t look at anybody and behaved as though nobody else was there at all. I just observed them without doing anything. From what I could hear of their talking, they seemed to be from Inner Mongolia.

I thought, couldn’t it be that they just aren’t familiar with this kind of place and situation? They aren’t used to being crowded into a confined space with lots of people. Living in tents on the grasslands, they have a fundamentally different sense of personal space and distance than urban dwellers. To a Japanese dweller in an overcrowded cityscape, who has to commute daily on packed trains, it’s very natural to subconsciously squeeze myself to accommodate more people having a place to sit. In our culture, only a drunk or a hoodlum would rest sprawled out like that while so many people were standing. But these Mongolians looked like nice people, resting peacefully or chatting happily with one another. Looking at that, I thought it’s just a cultural difference. As for me, when others crowd near, I tend to shrink myself, to accommodate or withdraw from them. But Mongolians, in contrast, seem to remain just as easily expansive as on their own grasslands of home.  And that can become a problem in a very crowded waiting room!

Reprogramming for Reactions from the Unconscious Level

In attending the seminar of Master Han Jingchen (Japanese: Kan Kyoushin), I felt countless such unconscious actions and reactions “imprinted” within myself. These are things that my body has just absorbed as a result of growing up and living as a Japanese person. But these little unconscious habits of movement could be a matter of life and death when it comes to martial arts. So Master Han begins his seminars by starting to reprogram unconscious reactions.

Let’s introduce some of the teachings. The lesson begins with some basic movements. These movements seem fairly simple and straightforward, but in fact they are pretty difficult. A lifetime of habitual bad movement really gets in the way and makes it impossible to move naturally. Because you just have to gradually get the knack of it, he didn’t really explain in too much detail. But the combative ideas underlying these apparently simple moves do become obvious.

After introducing this concept, Master Han presents the main zhanzhuang (Japanese: tantou) practice of Yiquan. The common notion of zhanzhuang is that you stand continuously in a particular posture. This is a practice method peculiar to the Chinese martial arts. But in this seminar, the transitions from one static posture to another were emphasized. First you stand with feet a bit wider than shoulder width. From there, raise both arms above your head. This simple move contains a lot of profound implications.

“Please raise your arms naturally.”, I hear Master Han instructing us. He goes around to every student and holds their arms in the lowered starting position, and has them raise their arms (against his light touch). “Do not use any strength at all. Just as you did when nobody was in front of you, just raise your arms naturally. Please just get rid of any notion or ingrained habit you may have of either using strength or just giving up – throw away either habit.”

But when I try, it’s really hard to do, even though he’s just touching my wrists lightly. “All you have to do is just raise your arms. That’s all it is. Try again. No, that’s not it. You’re pulling slightly before raising. Do it just the same as if you were practicing alone, just try to raise your arms naturally. No, that’s still right. Don’t try to figure out how to do it. It’s just raising your arms.”

Ki

I use the Japanese word ki to subsume most of the energy meanings associated with: prana, qi, kundalini, shakti, and mana. But those words have other associations, like natural earthlines energy, ordinary breath sensations, spiritual psycho-blowout enlightenment (or psychosis), and so on.

The word ki has some of those same ambiguities also. But anyway, for consistency and ease and shortness I tend to use the word ki power for the internal quasi-electric human energy current.

The ki I work with is not the easy comfy tingling that anybody feels right away in their palms and arms after being taught the opening move of any Taiji or Qigong system. That actually is a shallow type of ki manifestation but it's as different from the electric stormfield of ki that comes later as a kitchen faucet drip differs from the sluice gates opened on Hoover dam.

The other thing I've consistently heard when (rarely) trying to talk about ki with people is a variant on one of the following three lines:

a. Oh yes, I know exactly what you mean, that's the Yoga High of shavasana after a full Primary (or Second or any).

b. Oh yes, I know exactly what you mean, that's the Runner's High.

c. Oh yes, I know exactly what you mean, that's the feeling you get after finally reaching a really high mountain peak and looking out over the entire range. (Rocky Mountain High)

I know all the above feelings, the total relaxation and peace and languid immersion of potential-energetic expansion that comes with Peak Exhaustion as above. But strangely enough that isn't the ki activation either, not the ki power of martial arts training (though you do occasionally get those nice Zone and Flow states from and during combative training, even boxing, just like anything else).

Nope the ki activation power is different from everything above in a very specific way, it is hydraulic/electric flow and field, both at once, like a spinning gyroscope feels both very resistant to motion and  yet fully engaged in extreme motion, both at once. The ki activation once trained up to a certain degree is always instantaneously available, and fully directable within and outside the physical body.

Though of course, sadly, this energy is entirely useless in a world of Tasers, napalm, elephant tranq darts, H-bombs, Daisycutters that suck your brain out via air pressure manipulation, and so on. It even seems to be pretty much useless, or more accurately I should say otiose, unnecessary, in MMA and ordinary street fighting, but I'm still angled towards exploring its possible application there.

Weird huh. I feel so too.

Advice

Dear Tabby,

I'm just a quiet sort of ghost just getting by day to day in the Astral like anybody else. But times being what they are, I'd been finding it hard to scrape together enough Karma-Creds to keep my soul coherently integrated every month.I was just living off my capital, eating my seed corn of karmic points earned from my last Earth incarnation. My soul cohesion was starting to look kind of threadbare.  When I griped to my friend about it, he said he had an answer for me. Seems he's into some betting ring where they track invididual humans and gamble on their outcome - time and cause of death (they say that's a nice clean event to work with, cuts down on the arguments). So I threw a few K-Cred's into the pool on a professional car-eater. That's an Earth guy who smashes cars with a sledgehammer and eats the metal and glass for show. A heavy favorite up here to die during his act, but I bet against the spread and lo and behold, the guy chokes to death eating a ham sandwich on his day off. I really cleaned up on that one.  Since that got me hooked I've made a ton of K-Creds off the game, but lately I've started to have some qualms. See, the guys got impatient with the slow pace of Earth plane events so they've started to hover and flit around the Earth prospects, distracting them at critical moments so they'll drive into a utility pole, or nudging them to step into an open manhole, or slide on a banana peel off a high footbridge. In other words, they're gaming the system and the human marks are paying the price in blood. I don't feel right about that kind of stuff, so I'm wondering if I should withdraw from the action?

- Nervous About Getting Rich

Dear Nagger,

What are you, some kind of pussy? Think you're a saint? There's nothing at all wrong with a little off-world betting action, it's good clean fun. And if it keeps the wolf from the door, what kind of asshole is going to look a gift horse in the mouth? Don't worry about the body count, the Earthlings are all on a conveyor belt up here anyway. And doesn't it say in the Gita:

They have not been born, they do not die

So there you have it. Listen this sounds like fun and I could sure use the K-Cred's - shoot me an ectomail with your bud's cell, will you?

Overcoat of Clay

   Woody Allen is famous for saying:

I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens.

I think he's talking about the anticipated pain, injury, debility, etc. normally comes with the territory. In my case though, that isn't so much the problem. I have been through so much physical crap that I don't worry about that so much any more. I've lived through six major car crashes involving vehicles flipping and exploding; multiple surgeries for brain cancer; been hurtled straight through a windshield head first; jumped out of car doing 60 mph onto concrete highway; many times been knocked down (tai chi, systema) and knocked out (boxing); not to even mention the time I stupidly asked Vlad during underwater fight training to show me "for real" how he would actually kill somebody  in the water "the quickest way possible".. I think I got closer to the One Light that time than any other (to the extent I have any memory of it, ahaha!).

So it isn't so much the whole physical suffering thing that gets me hot under the collar or chewing my fingernails, sweating in anxious anticipation when it comes to death. Nope, the problem with death is the corpse! See, when we die, we leave a damn body behind. That is both humiliating and disgusting! Just awful. Imagine somebody has to clean up and deal with our damn body once we die. It's just not fair to whoever ends having to take out that trash. I really don't like that part.

So my problem with death boils down to the issue of garbage disposal. But how can you really assure that you won't end up as a purtrefying heap of cell decomposition on somebody's morgue slab? There just doesn't seem to be any good way to handle this. Nowadays there are people everywhere. Even if you died deep in some primeval forest, chances are somebody would find your corpse and have to somehow deal with it, instead of just leaving it for the bats and buzzards to chew up.

I noticed that problem when I visited the famous suicide forest in the Mt. Fuji area (Aokigahara ). Despite it being Japan, you'd be surprised how much wild mountain and forest area there is in that country. And this place hosts lots of dead bodies per year - but most are found by hikers or rangers or somebody. It's just no good.

Sometimes people jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, but usually their (somewhat shark-bitten) corpses end up washed to the beaches.

Note that even though my examples are suicides, I'm not personally talking about suicide - my point here is just no matter how or where you die, it's nearly impossible to avoid leaving a body behind as a disgusting embarassment that someone else has to deal with.

In all the times I've made this point, only once did I get an intelligent response that I hadn't really ever though of. Once a woman responded to me: "Somebody dealt with you when you were born, somebody will do the same when you're dead. It's normal; it's ok."

I liked that answer.

Still the whole corpse thing really creeps me out.

Salt doll

I recently found my ancient copy of The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. It reminds me that 30 years prior to my recent Yoga micro-fetish, I was already super into all kinds of Indic and Vedic metaphysics in a big way. But then I put it all aside to go try to kick ass in the world of academic high technology. Because I always seek whatever appears to be the highest power source at any given time. Stay tuned!

Anyway, the ultra-cool cross-dressing 19th century Bengali saint Ramakrishna liked to point out that everybody (I guess he meant mainly straight guys?) is hung up on 'woman and gold' (Kamini and Kanchana). I suppose we could neuter this, generalize it to sex and money:

Woman and gold have drowned the whole world in sin. God cannot be seen so long as one's passion for 'woman and gold' is not extinguished.

Of course in the 21st century, many have found that woman and gold in their pure form can entail a lot of overhead, expense, just plain trouble to obtain and maintain. Still the people need some kind of opiate, distraction from the scorching radiance of the one true light. Something to keep us drifting stupidly in the Bardic currents. So modern people mainly settle for "beer and TV".

Not to say he was anti-female at all, quite the opposite:

Little children play with dolls in the outer room just as they like, without any care or fear or restraint; but as soon as their mother comes in, they throw aside their dolls and run to her crying, "Mamma, mamma." You too, O men, are now playing in this material world, infatuated with the dolls of wealth, honor, fame, etc. and do not feel any fear or anxiety. If, however, you once see your Divine Mother, you will not afterwards find pleasure in these. Throwing them all aside, you will run to Her.

Anyway, when I've been to lots of power spots around the world, ones that are known as such, for example Puuhonua Hounaunau or the Kamakura Daibutsu, but also spots that haven't been called out publicly but which totally resonate with supernatural ki force that sometimes knocks me down physically, I always wonder: if the whole universe is just shakti, made of shakti, then why should any one spot punch your face any more than the local K-Mart parking lot or anywhere? It's all the same isn't it?

Ramakrishna had a kind of answer for that (he got a lot of mileage out of zoological and subsistence agriculture metaphors)

The milk of the cow in reality pervades the whole body of the animal through its blood, but you cannot milk it by squeezing the ears or the horns; you can get the milk only from the teats. Similarly, God pervades the universe everywhere, but you cannot see Him everywhere. He manifests Himself more readily in sacred temples, which are full of the spirit of devotion generated by the lives and spiritual practices of the devotees of former time.

Another cool thing he said that bears repeating, even if I myself, as a competitively trained Western male, haven't really quite got the hang of this one yet. But again I like his animal imagery:

The young of a monkey clasps and clings to its mother tightly when she moves about. The kitten on the other hand does not do so but mews piteously, and the mother grasps it by the neck. If the young of the monkey lets go its hold of its mother, it falls down and gets hurt. This is because it relies upon its own strength. But the kitten runs no such risk, as the mother herself carries it about from place to place. Such is the difference between self-reliance and entire resignation to the will of God.  

x

The greatest cheese movie ever made is X The Man with the X-Ray Eyes with Ray Milland.

The scientist begins with a small dose of xray vision eyedrops, and finds he can see through walls and clothes. That's fun. And if some is good, a lot more is better, right? So he OD's on it and pretty soon goes blind - he can see through everything like it isn't there.

Finally he sees through the entire universe and finds himself eyeball to eyeball with God staring back at him, at which point he goes nuts and ... does something wild!

What a scream, I just love that movie. If you really did see through everything you'd be looking at something sad.

When I first read the end passage of Melville's story Bartleby the Scrivener zillions of years ago:

The report was this: that Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring:—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity:—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. 
  Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!

I thought, huh? Dead letters? What's the big deal, find something really tragic, with some blood and guts on the floor, heads through the windshield type of thing. But now I totally get it. The saddest thing is the emptiness and futility of everything. Look over some old emails sometime, you'll get the picture -  all the stuff planned and arranged there that never happened, or that did happen and it's long gone, barely remembered, pointless in retrospect, the people scattered, whatever hoped for harvest from it turned since to mere air.

Everything we write, say, think, or do is a dead letter right out of the starting gate.

Pack it in

So now we have Big Dog 2008, updated version:

I could rant here about how tech is taking over the world. But that would be a cliche. So I won't. But it is.

For now Big Dog is just a cute mechanized pack animal. (Or is cute the word? Those backward facing front knees make my skin crawl. But that's merely my genetically imprinted visual and kinetic species bias. I think there are drugs for that now.)

But later, Big Dog will be weaponized, maybe they'll nickname it as Big Wog or something. It will be a relentless attack and destroy hound. But not to worry. After all, these same DARPA guys could easily nuke or Tase or napalm you right now, today, without needing any further high tech solutions. So it's no problem as you are already totally under their thumb and they can already kill you or torture you beyond Torquemada's wildest wet dream, even as things stand, without a single further dollar spent on research.

Keep in mind though, Big Dog is something that DARPA has no problem with a nobody like you or me seeing. So you can imagine what they keep under wraps.

Humans are obsolete. But its cute how most of us don't realize that yet. Aristotle asked his question:

What is that for the sake of which all else is done?

And most people today think the answer is: human comfort, safety, survival, happiness.... human values in short. That's where they're wrong. It's not that way at all. Humans are still kept around to tend the Machine. But the Proles are already dispensable. As machines learn to function and evolve and self-repair without tending, the Outer Party will become disposable, leaving things to the Inner Party, just what it's always wanted, to find itself ruling the roost in solitary splendor.

I grind my face through the mud at your Lotus Feet

Now I'm reading Baba: Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Yogi. I've had this since it first came out, 2005. On my list since then, to get to. But even though I speed-read about 20 books each week, it's taken me until now.

Really interesting book, by Rampuri - an American dropout who around 1970 became one among the first wave of foreign sannyasin - Shiva-intoxicated renunciates, in his case under the direction of a famous Indian guru.

These Shiva guys are like the ultra-cool wandering Indian proto-hippies profiled in the outstanding DVD Naked in Ashes, which I have reviewed elsewhere. Anyway Rampuri's book tells his own personal story of that. Rampuri also has a website.

OK then, this is definitely one of the more interesting My-Guru-and-his-Disciple type of books out there. But the question remains, is any guru relationship necessary or meaningful? And does any path, discipline, process, method really have any point? Yoga in the West is mainly a workout for developing an inventory of physical flexibility stunts to impress ourselves or our friends. That isn't what these Shivaites are about, as they hardly do any asana at all, and if so, only rather simple postures (though admittedly they sometimes hold a given pose for up to 30 continuous years which is kind of cool).

Consider the question from the non-duality p.o.v. Those neo-advaitans think all the guru/disciple stuff is basically bs. All methods, paths, progressions, levels, attainments, etc. - all just total nonsense. For example, well known non-duality guy Tony Parsons writes as follows in his book As It Is: The Open Secret of Spiritual Awakening:

Are you saying that therapeutic processes of, say, counseling, rebirthing, etc., are of no value in preparing someone to be more open to liberation?

There is no one to prepare for liberation, as there is no one to be liberated.

Okay, but isn't someone who is happier with themselves more open and available?

All we have is someone who is happier with his or her self. There are no rules. No conditions are required prior to awakening. We are talking here about an energy, a light, which is the source of all that is. This energy is impersonal. It is totally disinterested in what is apparently going on for an illusory body/mind. In fact, what is going on is nothing. It is only dreamed. I would say that the divine energy can sweep everything away in one timeless gesture, but that is not necessary. Darkness is only "apparent" - it is the illusion of there being no light. There aren't' different textures or levels of darkness. When light appears there is no darkness. And just as there are no levels of darkness, so there are no levels of progress towards light.

The problem with therapy is that it presumes there is a problem. In psychological terms there seems to be a journey from dark, through gray, to a lighter, gray, which is more bearable. Someone can appear to progress from an uncomfortable or even distressing state to a better one - this is how consciousness wants to experience itself. But as far as awakening is concerned, nothing is actually happening because awakening emerges when the apparent separate self is no more.

But what about such things as yoga? Surely these techniques can bring one nearer to an acceptance of nothingness.

A separate entity cannot draw itself nearer to its own destruction. The doer cannot carry out a practice in order to discover the non-doer. However, everyones' experience is uniquely and exactly appropriate for them, and if that includes meditation or yoga, then that's what will happen. Everything that is apparently happening contains the invitation, including eating a hamburger, flying a kite, or sitting in the lotus position.

So there is no way that we can prepare ourselves in order to be better receptacles?

Again you are seeing this only from the point of separate individuality. There are no receptacles - you are already the infinite expression. All you can do is come to see that there is nothing for you to do. That is a huge step; it is revolutionary.

So. There you have it. But I wonder why I still have preferences.... I like Kona better than I like Baltimore... why? It's all the same infinite light. Or I desire some one person to touch me while I wouldn't want some other person to come near me with a 10-foot pole. Yet they're both the same.

But are they? Is identity of material the same as absolute identity? I'm not sure. Non-dual types like to say that it's  like  the film projected on a movie theater screen -  no matter what story is happening on the big screen, it's all just light. That's true in a certain sense. But again is material identity absolute identity? Imagine beginning with a shapeless lump of clay. Now a potter works for an hour making some fancy pot out of it. Or a lump of glass before and after a glass-blower works. In both cases, the before and after states are identical in terms of material (modulo any chemical difference brought on by firing).

Materially, yes. But structurally the beginning and end states aren't identical at all. In terms of Shannon information theory, the number and sequence of bits required to describe the start state of the clay or glass blob would differ very markedly from the bit sequence needed to encode the end state of pot or vase (such that all these states could be losslessly reconstructed).

I understand that a pot or vase is not inherently or necessarily superior in any way to a lump of clay or a blob of molten silicon. But they aren't the same. These people who love the "identity of material implies absolute identity" argument are really very shamefully ignorant of standard information theory and Shannon entropic coding. They just aren't thinking subtly enough!

But be that as it may. When all's said and done, I like these Shiva sanyassins. Shiva is a total kickass god, none better. I will end up as one of these guys, when the time is right.

I have written more on non-dual spiritualism elsewhere, and elsewhere.

Rough

I guess you should always take interest in precisely that which repulses you. So in Yiquan training for me that has been fa li. In earlier posts I went so far as to analogize Yiquan's fa li practice to karate, which it superficially resembles.

But now in the spirit of whatever you are resisting is your teacher type of thinking, I've been heavily working on it (along with mega minutes of standing per day) and I find that done in a certain way it's great. You can eliminate the tension from it, especially if you practice with the mian hua qiu (cotton bag) training that Master Yao particularly emphasized and drilled with me many hours on this just-past training trip. Done that way, it is entirely differentiable from karate.

But all I really care about is how does this work make me feel. That is the whole sum of any training for me. And the fa li fits in really well, done the way I'm working it now.

Master Yao said his wife made a new mian hua qiu for me, but since I didn't make it back from Shanghai in time to attend the last park session, I wasn't able to pick it up this time. Next time then.

Reed and Oak

Normally we think something is pretty much true or pretty much false. And we just make allowances for some contradictions and anomalies that cut against our prevailing judgment. For example, those who defend the USA mil.gov's 9-11 story are sometimes aware of contradictions like the FBI's reporting of zero time duration for all calls connected from Flight 77 - meaning that Ted Olson's story of his wife's call from the plane is demonstrably, officially, false. But they shrug and say well there are always a few loose ends. And skeptics of the mil.gov's story likewise minimize anything that cuts against their version of reality.

But everybody agrees on one thing, and works on this basis: a story is basically either true or false. Things happened a certain way or some other way, but not both and not neither.

Lately though I've been re-reading Raymond Moody's excellent book The Last Laugh: A New Philosophy of Near-Death Experiences, Apparitions, and the Paranormal. Although it isn't quite Moody's own direct thesis, this book does raise the possibility that there really is no truth. All stories are inherently false, and the difference between them is merely how useful they can be as power tools for whatever group promotes them.

This may be the only truth. Well it's been said many times many ways, not only in Eastern philosophy but also figures big in post-modern lit crit and other venues.

But I feel those who would espouse this view (that there is no truth, only more or less useful stories), don't take it quite far enough. Do they see the implications? It means we are being totally gamed at every moment of our existence. It means the Matrix story is literally true. And it means the most extreme paranoiac fantasies are entirely justified. In other words, 1984 is the best guide to actual life.

Traditionally people who tend to hold this philosophical position are squandering their amazement with obsessive interest in the conceptually sexy "there is no truth" side of the equation while largely ignoring the more interesting practical correlate: There is only power.

The investment world is going nuts right now, debating whether the Fed is causing inflation (with rate cuts and credit guarantees) or just the opposite, are they secretly draining liquidity from the system behind the scenes, covertly waging a genuine war against inflation that is leading toward severe deflation? But people are arguing about this using the fedgov's own monetary statistics and figures. And they are free to falsify and create any damn figures they want. Because they have that power, we're all at the wrong end of the gun. So there is no basis for meaningful analysis.