TABBY CAT Gamespace

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!

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."

* * *

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)

He don't see lights a flashin', Plays by sense of smell

For a student of traditional martial arts, what are the two main things you can get from boxing?

(1) Learning to relax. Even though to my knowledge (note that with this phrase I am precisely NOT trashing "every other teacher and method" as somebody recently claimed, because I don't KNOW every teacher and method!) only Ben Lo teaches to way to remove unconscious tension, boxing at least will teach you to eliminate conscious tension, especially under stress of fatigue, pain, fear, etc. It's the best for that. Two main things require you to relax in boxing. First is that if you're tense you'll gas out after a single 3-minute round, guaranteed. Energy requirement for maintaining constant tension is too high. Second is that you won't be able to hit fast enough if you aren't relaxed. Third is another fatigue issue - you'll start to drop your hands from your head area, which is ok as a conscious strategy if you are Roy Jones Jr. but if you aren't then I don't really advise you try.

(2) Dealing with head shots. An experienced boxer can hit the head of a high level traditional martial artist (karate, aikido, etc.) like taking candy from a baby. It's a matter of training.

In Systema we learned to take body shots very well. So if you go to boxing from that you won't have any issue with body shots. It will be the rare person who can even slightly faze you with a body shot if you've had several years of Systema work with either Vlad or Mikhail.

But the head is another matter. Though Systema and other systems do have a bit of very careful occasional head work, fact is that unless you've studied some other art, any art (as long as it's boxing haha) you are going to get tagged real hard and real often in the head til you master the boxing basics. You'll be very surprised at how easily, quickly,  and hard they can blast you.

Even if you free spar in your current art, if you stick to MOQ with a good boxer, you'll still get tagged like hell by him, if you haven't worked with one before.

Post

 Goddamn it! I apologize... this was supposed to be the premier martial arts blog on the net, yet I continually veer off the rails into all kinds of irrelevant babbling about the astral plane or gangsters or the High Command and what have you. And the only time I ever do seem to touch base back with martial arts is when I start boastfully blithering about how I can use my Tai Chi to whip my weight in wildcats.

Dear dear dear... tsk. Let's put a stop to this ruinous trend right here and now.

Lessee lessee... what can we say about martial arts. Maybe something with a literary twist?

I found through months of hard training in Beijing that zhan zhuang (post standing), is much revered by both the originators of this practice (the Yi Quan schools themselves), but has now spread further  to become a kind of warm up thingie for almost every Chinese martial art.

Of course, despite the hours spent on this over decades, all of them still retain their unconcious tension. So, um... . Anyway. Only Ben Lo to my knowledge teaches how to shed oneself of that unconcious tension. But don't let's have that stop us from seeing the literary potential in zhan zhuang, which many Chinese and even Western students practice for hours every day.

No less a literary light than Norman Mailer himself, though he never trained Yi Quan,  intuited the force that accrues to standers when he wrote in his classic books The Fight as below:

Other champions had a presence larger than themselves. They offered charisma. Foreman had silence. It vibrated about him in silence. One had not seen men like that for thirty years, or was it more? Not since Norman worked for a summer in a mental hospital had he been near anyone who could stand so long without moving, hands in pockets, vaults of silence for his private chamber. He had taken care them of catatonics who would not make a gesture from one meal to the next. One of them, hands contracted into fists, stood in the same position for months, only to erupt with a sudden punch that broke the jaw of a passing attendant. Guards were alway informing new guards that catatonics were the most dangerous of the patients. They were certainly the strongest. One did not need the other attendants, however, to tell you. If a deer's posture in the forest can say, "I am vulnerable, irreplaceable, and soon destroyed," so the posture of a catatonic haunts the brain. "Provided I do not move," this posture says, "all power will come to me."

Boxing plus Taiji, Part 2

I wrote a little about Taiji plus boxing, what's the relation if any. Eventually I will write more on it, but for now I just want to add a little note about how to even approach the question.(In this post and all in this series, I am discussing Western boxing, MoQ. Not MMA, K1, Muay Thai, Sanda or anything of that ilk. So go elsewhere if this topic bores you and have a care your butt with the door.)

First thing is that boxing is a regulated striking sport and that's all. This means that almost all the actual techniques shown or implied by the various Taiji forms are illegal or irrelevant. Any kind of grappling, excessive clinching, rabbit punching, kicking, pushing, pulling etc. it's all pretty much 犯則, illegal, not the done thing, got that?

So there's no point to talk about any kind of direct technique-based relation between the two arts, just forget about that.

Second, what about body mechanics, structural/physical stuff? Yeah sure, the modern take on IMA in general and Taiji in particular is that it teaches some kind of whole-body mechanics, put your hips into it or your kua or whatever, and we're supposed to genuflect to that. Forget it. Boxers already know perfectly well how to punch, and their training fully reflects it. Just look at any KO photo of Rocky Marciano, there you have it. So forget all that physical/structural stuff. It's not so much wrong exactly as it is just irrelevant. It's merely the modern IMA propaganda machine blowing off steam because they are embarassed to talk about ki because everybody assumes that's either fake and/or useless.

Well then what does the above leave us to work with, if anything? Before I get to that, in a future post, I want to make sure we are formulating the question sensibly. Because boxing is a precisely limited sport there's no use to blather vaguely back and forth, as in:

"I hereboy assert that Taiji can apply to boxing!"

"No no you fuckwit, it's all about just good ol' boxing training they should be doinng anyway."

That kind of back and forth is too vague to be even remotely interesting. Done that way the discussions isn't worth pursuing.

It needs to be cast in a precisely falsifiable logical structure to be interesting. That means nailing down a formulaic proposition.

So let's have the assertion (A) be something like: For any given reasonably athletic person (P) who wants to get into boxing, if a restricted time-slice (t) of his total potential training time (T) is devoted to correctly taught, rigorously pursued Taiji training, then his results (R) (as measured by number of wins, types of wins, requests to be a sparring partner or any other reasonably external metric) will be greater, all else equal, then if t had been used for more-of-the-same normal boxing training.

There could also be a variant of the above in which the final clause states: " ... than if t had been used for any other types of humanly feasible training or for any other purpose whatsoever."

If (a) the question is properly formulated as above; and if (b) the truth value of the proposition is T, then we can say that Taichi appplies to boxing and they have an interesting relation.

There is yet another version of the formula we could pursue in which the terms Taiji and boxing are inverted and basicaly we ask whether boxing helps Taiji. But to me Taiji is already the more complete, inclusive art so that proposition won't detain me for now.

Now that I have the question properly formulated, I can at least begin to discuss it sensibly in a future post.

No Taiji no strike

Suddenly there are tons of teaching materials available for $$$ that purport to teach Tai Chi striking. I'm not going to name names but the disease is virulent and spreading fast. Called combat tai chi or Tai Chi relaxed-yet-powerful striking or internal striking, what have you - this junk is everywhere you look, you see vids of big guys whaling away at padded posts, focus mitts, heavy bags or training dummies, and striving for just that certain soupçon of perfect alignment and structure and relaxed body torque that will qualify the smack for a 5-Star internal rating.

Guess what guys. That's all irrelevant. Tai Chi is not a striking art in the first place. It's true that in one of the modes of Tai Chi work, you can grab-and-ricochet an opponent's inherent, unconscious tension so fast that the effect appears exactly like a real nasty strike. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the labored and embarrassing 'Tai Chi Relaxed Power Striking!' type of crudescence that's seeping through the youtube and blogsphere woodwork.

Oh so Tabby you presumptuous ignorant blowhard are you saying that people should be tense when they strike, eh? Eh?!  Is that it?? Nope. Not what I said at all. I said that Tai Chi has nothing to do with striking in the first place, tense or relaxed. It's irrelevant. Like saying we must integrate the principles of water polo into banjo instruction.

It's not a striking art to begin with and to cast it as such will just lead you down the wrong path. But I can understand why people get confused. They get confused because after a few years practice of Tai Chi your bones get really hard. So that if you do happen to strike somebody say with a light relaxed dropping chop, it hurts way more than they'd ever expect. It's also true that traditional Chinese point striking work (点穴法) is greatly enhanced by the ki power that Tai Chi fosters. But that's a whole different kettle of fish and a horse of an entirely different color that I won't ride in this post (no connection to the oafish Relaxed Striking stuff now being peddled all over the street and the net).

Anyway for the above listed irrelevant reasons, people get the stupid idea that there's such as thing as Tai Chi striking and they run off like lemmings over that cliff because let's get real here for once - people (especially men) love striking, punching, etc. the whole idea of that is such a wet dream that they're more than eager to twist Tai Chi in to something it's not and pull it down to the gutter of their own dirty minds.

Not that there's anything whatsoever wrong with striking per se mind you. If you want to learn relaxed striking you don't need Tai Chi in the first damn place. Either Russian Systema or boxing will teach you everything  you need to know about relaxed striking. Watch a few clips of Vlad doing his thing, spar a few rounds with a good boxer, maybe suck in a couple of the Tyson training vids, take a gander at any Roy Jones Jr. fight... I now pronounce you good to go! That's relaxed striking ok? It's great. It'll break your face. OK? Happy now? I'm not saying strike training is easy. I'm saying it's an entirely different subject. So you don't ever need to bring Tai Chi into the discussion. (Water polo and banjo aren't easy either.)

Tai Chi isn't a striking art. Some people are dumb enough that they rejoin me as follows: "But but but... Tabby (you fuckwit)... there are fist techniques in the form!!" Screw that the fist is just another way to touch. Tai Chi is not the art of the strike, Tai Chi is the art of the ricochet! You grab their tension with nothing more than a contact instant and simultaneously whip it back through them. That's combat Tai Chi. I once sustained a ricochet injury in an advanced gun training class from a classmate's errant shot (a cop!), but that concrete range wall didn't walk over and do a damn thing to me.

Anyway most of the time it's better and safer to practice Tai Chi in "smoke and water" yielding mode. By the way, not saying that Tai Chi is the "best" (or even adequate) method for street defense or match fighting or impressing your friends or any other given purpose. I am saying this is what it is, take it or leave it.

I just can't believe the proliferation of materials that strain and sweat to cast Tai Chi as some kind of striking art (though totally relaxed mind you, we aren't like all those others, no siree our killer Tai Chi strikes are relaxed and aligned, you see, and that's what makes us very very special). Fuck it. For that just join a boxing club yeah? You'll get relaxed one way or the other.

Run with the hare to hunt with the hounds

Normally I'm not much for running. However, I've been boxing so much this summer I've had to get into roadwork a little bit, just to keep from gassing out with these guys. Normally my thing is more jump-rope, but anyway.

Two things you need to know if you are going to run without &*@$-ing yourself up!

Footfall: HEEL STRIKING IS THE WORST WAY TO RUN

After reading the link above, if you still don't believe that heel striking is bad news, consider this fragment of an interview with running author Christopher McDougall:

______________________________________________________________________

Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Christopher McDougall

 Question: Born to Run explores the life and running habits of the Tarahumara Indians of Mexico’s Copper Canyon, arguably the greatest distance runners in the world. What are some of the secrets you learned from them?

Christopher McDougall: Strange as it sounds, the Tarahumara taught me to change my relationship with the ground. Instead of hammering down on my heels, the way I’d been taught all my life, I learned to run lightly and gently on the balls of my feet. The day I mastered it was the last day I was ever injured.

______________________________________________________________________

So take that on board or you'll end up with wrecked knees, shin splints, plantar fascitis, and even a fractured femur (in women, smaller bones can't take the stress). Actually if you run with this kind of correct (front) footfall, running becomes essentially identical to rope-skipping, in feeling anyway. Ever see anybody jump rope on their heels? Mmm? Well, did ya?

When your running feels like your rope work you know you're running correctly. But I admit, running is maybe a bit more of a workout over a long period.

Second thing you need to know is correct breath control or you'll gas out. This isn't quite the same as sparring breath control, this can be more regular and coordinated because the rhythm of action is predictable. You need to read up on the Russian breathing method described in the book Let Every Breath: Secrets of the Russian Breath Masters by Vladimir Vasiliev, most especially the chapter 'Hit the Road' which covers breath methods for walking and running long distance.

MMA

 

Mixed Martial Arts is a great thing. It's great because it identifies the issue with laser clarity.It achieves that clarification via:

1. Weight classes: open and frank acknowledgment that size (mass and volume) is 90% of the game in personal combatives (whether sport or street).

2. Athleticism: open and frank acknowledgment that conditioning is the other 10%.

3. Homogenization of technique: open and frank acknowledgment that a few fairly basic things work best and so everyone should work pretty much from the same practical toolkit, tools that should be honed exclusive of weirdo distractions.

(I'm not even going to mention killer instinct because it's so basic to your floor model human male, just as I won't specifically call out other prerequisites such as lungs, kneecaps, or triceps.)

There you have it. And this is a very great contribution of MMA (actually, a generalization of the essential truth already revealed from boxing long since). So all told I really admire MMA people, because they are facing reality which is always good. Truth is always the best starting point.

And what is there that suggests any other view of personal combatives? 

Well, sometimes people like to say that MMA is unrealistic because "there are no rules on the street". But that's basically irrelevant to my 3 points above, which apply pretty universally. Though yes there are some additional considerations on the streets such as sucker punch, improvised weapons, edged weapons and others, multi-party attacks, escape options, and so on. But that can all be perfectly well layered onto a good foundation from the main three points above, so all else equal - there's just no escaping them.

Another tack people sometimes take is to point to the early success of the Gracies, who admittedly were relatively small, soft, creative, subtle, and opportunistic in their spectacularly successful application of BJJ to proto-MMA. But all that has been washed aside long since, and may never be repeated.

So the only thing left is:

What?!?! I hear you. You're thinking this is the ultimate fantasy - that a softly philosophical approach as represented by Master Zheng Manqing is worth shit. You may well be right. I'm not disputing the points that could be made here which are so tediously obvious they aren't even worth my time to review.

But the Prof's idea of gentle, non-violent, metaphysical power is a polestar for the human race. Even if it's an impossible dream, at least it's an interesting one. Because I said I admire MMA, but I didn't say I find it very interesting - it's dull for the same three reasons I gave above. I've been around the track a few times in this vale of tears and I've already learned perfectly well the essential lessons of the Earth Plane, that only the strong survive, might makes right, size matters, and so on and on.

But if there's even a .000000000000000000001% chance that the Prof was pointing to something real, then even if he himself did not fully realize/achieve it (unknown to me for certain) then when people ask me how I can retain any interest in Tai Chi as exemplified by Prof. Zheng, I simply reply: "What else is out there?"