No More Changes

That was a lot more drama in my life than I need.  I won't bore you with the details but I lost my blog and my new website for a few days and they kind of took my mind with them.  I like work and I like solving problems.  But I'll take a screwed up plumbing or electrical system over software and a database any day.

So check out my site!  And I have no plans to change anything else on this blog for some time to come.  Well, maybe I'll work on improving the categories and tags, and seeing if I can get that "related posts" plug-in to work again, I thought it was cool.

By the way the search engine in the sidebar is a little better now.

Changes

I've been busy.  You can look forward to a video called Playground Taijiquan in the next week.  I wish I could say the look of the blog is now stable, but it will probably keep changing a bit.  That button on the right will lead to my brand new site with video and pictures and new content with in a day or so...knock on wood.

Also expect to get a FAQ page in the next week or so.  Any suggestions for that will be warmly welcomed.  My idea is to use it to make the site more search-able (523 posts, oy vey!).  The new search seems like an improvement.  Also on the sidebar I put the Donaton Button back up for those of you who asked for it, also I went with a "tag cloud"  because it is so random...kind of like spin the blog...where it stops nobody knows.

I also have some new theorys from George Xu in the works.

Also, just a thought..., since I'm creating one of those hopefully not too tacky "what our fans are saying" pages on my website for classes, if you consider yourself a fan (in the broadest sense of the word which could even include adversary) feel free to write me a line or too of cosmic praise.  If your goal is to embarrass me than go ahead and put it in the comments section, otherwise send me an email:   scophillips "at" yahoo.com

Thanks

Ye Xiaolong

Ye Xiaolong was an important transition teacher for me.  I studied Lan Shou and Push-Hands with him for three months, 6 days a week, 3 hours a day.  There was usually one or two other students around.  His main method of teaching (besides saying "Bu Hao!*" all the time) was to put his hands on me and physically correct my movement.  It was very satisfying.

I'm putting up a new website soon, and while looking for images of my teachers I came across these videos of him doing Yang Style Taijiquan.  I think of him as a Lan Shou Master so if you watch these videos look for the sudden long tearing motions characteristic of Lan Shou.  There are also a bunch of old George Xu Videos if you hunt around on this Youtube Channel.  (Warning, you'll probably want to turn the sound off.)





* Bu Hao means 'No Good.'

Albion's Seed

Sgt. Rory Miller wrote a nice piece recently comparing pacifists to violence groupies, and saying they are both living in a fantasy world.  As clear eyed as his take on the two groups is, it is missing a historical perspective.

My half-wife likes to point out that I’m driven by intense passions.  I get hooked on something and I think about it all the time.
I can hang with one powerful idea for a few years.  I was actually passionate about pacifism for at least a year as a teenager.
For about two years in my early twenties I saw every single dance performance that played in San Francisco.  I didn’t have any money, but everyone knew me as the guy who would fold programs or help move equipment before the show, or help clean up after the show.  So I saw all the shows for free.

For a few years I was so passionate about tea, I would bring my tea equipment with me even when I went rock climbing.
I’m always passionate about martial arts.

I’m often passionate about a thinker or a book.  I’ve been known to talk about an idea over and over for years.  On reflection it can seem kind of creepy, but that kind of passion changes a person.

Anyway, about 10 years ago I read Albion's Seed, Four British Folkways in America, and I became obsessed with how powerful the theory was at explaining American behavior.

In the book David Hackett Fischer describes the first four American settler groups, Southern Cavaliers, Puritans, Quakers, and Backcountry.  For each group he makes a long list of what he calls folkways.  For instance he mentions eating & drinking habits, reactions to strangers, housing, medicine, education, clothing, liberty, child rearing, marriage, death, and many other folkways.  When you read the book you start to realize that the views of each of these ‘cultures’ have been static for four hundred years!  In America today, an individual is free to pick and choose, or change, their views on any subject.  So individuals are often composites, for instance one may hold a Quaker view of guns (no one should have them), but a Backcountry view of Whisky (it should be served with breakfast).

Of course there is such a thing as a new idea, but most of the time when an American opens her mouth, she is going to present an idea from one of the Four British Folkways.

Since I’m writing this in response to Sgt Rory Miller’s piece, I’ll just recite the Four Folkways as they pertain to violence.

Southern Cavaliers: Respect and deference should guide all behavior.  Violence is the prerogative of some people and not others.  Everyone must know their place.  Servants learn their place by being beaten or put to work on a chain-gang.  Others are destine to lead troops. Propriety dictates that each class of people rise to their specific responsibilities with in a given hierarchy. If an equal dares to insult my integrity or the integrity of a lady under my care, we will fight a duel-- a fair fight with ‘seconds’ to judge.  The weaker sex should never fight.  The purpose of violence is to expand and hold power.  A man’s home is his castle.  And as Thomas Jefferson put it, “There is no greater form of exercise than hunting.”

Puritan: Do the crime, serve the time.  The Puritans invented police.  The early Colonies elected a constable whose job it was to search or inspect everyone’s home at some regular interval like every six months.  We must have uniform standards and respect for elders.  Weapons are for the collective defense and to protect Liberty.  Liberty  here means a proud community standard.  So constables have a stick to beat non-conformists and other disturbers of “the peace.”  The more grievous the offence, the more severe the punishment.  (In the early days Quakers were burned at the stake.)

Quakers: Everyone has pure light in their hearts.  What do we need guns for?

Backcountry: Who you looking at?  Yep, I’m a redneck, but if you call me that to my face you’d better be prepared to die (or be sleeping with my sister).  Weapons are an integral part of my circulatory system.

----------------
Warning Politics Ahead.  Skip the last paragraph if you are easily impassioned.
---------------

Now as powerful as this theory is, and it is one heck of a powerful theory, it doesn’t explain everything.  There are ideas outside the 4 boxes.  So as I was doing the dishes this evening I was trying to think of an idea about violence which is outside of the Four Folkways.  I didn’t come up with anything, but it did occur to me that all Four Folkways approve of Missionaries.  Which reminded me of Michael B. Oren’s book Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present. In it he explains that for the last 150 years, every time Americans go to the Middle East we build a school or a hospital.

Think about that.  That is something all Americans seem to agree is a good idea, a nice thing to do.  In the Middle East, Americans have started nearly every University, and we have built Hospitals in every region.

But think about it again.  What kind of message does that send to the people of the Middle East?  They are getting the message that we must believe they are ignorant and incapable of caring for themselves.  How humiliating.

(Israelis offer free organ transplants for Palestinian children.  They have found a way to stop suicide bombings using only collaborators, check points, and fences.  Humiliating.)

AlQeda is crystal clear:  Stop humiliating us!  Show us some dignity and just start Killing Us!  Please!  Death!
How do we respond?  Ideally we will capture them, take them water boarding, and build more schools and hospitals.

The author teaching at the Arab Sports Center in East Jerusalem.

Big Mistakes

Youtube is picking up speed.  More and more martial arts stuff is showing up every second.  While offering constructive criticism of people who put themselves on Youtube is not always welcome, it should be.  We should encourage thoughtful criticism and feedback. I say bring it on.

Other peoples mistakes can be really instructive.  I don't want to make a video showing everyone the wrong way to practice, but I don't have to because this guy Michael Pekor did it for me.



He has two major problems:

1.  When he hits the padded pole sometimes part of the shock of that hit goes back into his body.  You can see this because his head shakes.  This is especially obvious around 1:00.  Doing this for even a short time can damage your heart because force issued through the arms leads straight back into the heart.  He should back off.

2.  His shoulders are leaving the dantian.  Again this is most obvious around 1:00 in the video.  The shoulder comes forward and out.  In this "out" position, power and connection are lost in every direction except the one he is hitting in.  I'm not saying it won't hurt to get hit by this guy, it most certainly will hurt.  Taijiquan is not just about power and fighting is also about perfecting ones art, and "shoulders outside the dantian" is a flaw.

It is imperative that if he chooses to experiment with my corrections that he fix the shock problem first!  If he were to fix the shoulder problem first the shock problem would become dramatically more dangerous!  The shoulder problem is currnetly functioning like a trip-switch, defusing much of the power travelling back toward the heart.

Fix the shock problem by getting rid of the padding and just hit the solid pole.  If even the slightest bit of shock travels back towards your torso, your structure is wrong.  Don't hit very hard or you will break your hand.

Fixing the "shoulders outside the dantian" is more difficult.  The arms must first be completely empty-- drained of tension, intension, form, and conception.  From that state they can gently be drawn into the dantian.  Once the whole body is unified with the dantian, jing and qi are much easier to distinguish.  Thus it is a simple progression from there to allowing the mind (Yi) to lead the annimated part of us (Qi) which will, without any conscious act, take the whole body mass (Jing) for a ride.

Our Health Care is Amazing

One of my blogging categories is "Health," but I advise my readers to skip this blog if you are allergic to politics.

The American government has a superb health care plan.  Let’s review the details.

Fresh water available everywhere for drinking and cleaning.  Large numbers of people use to die from water borne illness, and small skin infections.

Fluoride for the teeth.  Before fluoride and other universal dental hygiene, people had “tooth-aches” so often that it was standard to have two drinks of hard liquor with lunch everyday to kill the pain (and speed death).

Plagues use to come along every generation or so and wipe out 10 to 50 percent of the population.

Famine was once a regular occurrence.
Today, the infectious diseases spread hand to mouth like colds and flu's are a mild annoyance, they no longer kill off large numbers of people every year like measles, mumps,  polio, and small pox once did.  We could probably eliminate colds and flu as well if we were willing to wear masks at the first signs of illness.
If you do happen to get an infection, anti-biotics are so inexpensive and readily available that they are being over used.
The government makes sure that doctors have degrees which makes it less likely that they will kill you.
So what’s left?

Genetic diseases are still around, some of them are mitigated by medicine, some not.  Some can be avoided by testing before pregnancy.

That leaves degenerative diseases which sometimes coincide with death in later years.  Not getting addicted to drugs, alchohol or inhaling large amounts of smoke, all reduce the likelihood of developing a degenerative disease.  It is still being debated whether or not government should make controlling these behaviors part of its health plan.

Over eating is a killer which may not have been very common in the past, but it is also entirely preventable through personal discipline.  Only war and communism have been successful at stopping industrial commerce from putting food in peoples mouths.  But government plays an important (if imperfect) role in making sure the food we buy doesn’t kill us.

On the subject of personal discipline, getting enough sleep and exercise, and being part of social networks, all have enormous benefits in keeping illnesses at bay.

Accidents are really a different animal--some are easily avoided, some are not.  Our emergency wards are half full with people hurt by drugs and alcohol.  Emergency rooms also care for people who have heart attacks and strokes, and seniors who have fallen down.  Accidents are only a percentage of emergency room problems but the system of caring for people who have accidents and allowing them to pay for it over time works well, even though all the drug addicts’ expenses are averaged into their bills.  As a society, we have a choice, we can take away the civil rights of people caught abusing drugs or we can use our emergency rooms to play catch and release with them, either way the cost should be a number we all know so that we can debate how to pay for it.

Pregnancy should be an entirely separate system.  If as a society we believe that preemies, and severely deformed or oxygen deprived children should be kept alive and nurtured, and we do believe that, then it makes sense to create an insurance pool for them, or fund this entirely by charity the way all our hospitals used to be funded.

(I’m sure many people choose not to get married or to wait until after they have children to get married, just in case they have an expensive child-birth.  With an expensive child-birth the independent mother can throw herself on the mercy of the state and the father can keep his bank account.)

The commercial drive of our society has been bringing the costs of health care down very, very fast.  But constant new innovation and experimentation in medicine is enormously expensive.

I don’t really have an opinion on medical insurance except to say that it has always seemed too expensive for me by a factor of 10.  I’d be willing to pay what I pay for car insurance to pre-empt the cost of an accident or a surprise degenerative or genetic disease, but not ten times that amount. I’d probably be willing to pay more if I thought it was protecting me from losing my house, if I owned a house.

The debate is very complex, and there is no reason to believe it will be resolved in my lifetime.  That shouldn’t stop us from acknowledging how fantastically successful our government run health care system already is.

It may seem like I’m drifting into the realm of politics here, but I’m not.  The main reason I’m writing this blog is to point out that it is really hard to understand what religion used to be.  The ways of life and death that nurtured the world’s religions are often in direct competition with modernity and air conditioning.  Today, the realm of what we are calling religion or faith or ritual or sacred --simply does not have to deal with the same forces it once did.  It’s not that we are less religious, it’s just that the world is so different it’s challenging to even imagine what it used to be like.

Gongfu, ritual theater and possession rituals developed in a China in which people got sick and died a lot more often than we can imagine.  Chinese medicine was for a thousand years the most developed form of medicine around, but it never came close to doing what we take for granted in the 21st Century.

PS.  I wrote this about 3 weeks ago and didn’t publish it because I know how fast a blog can turn sour when it starts talking politics.
But, heck, now that the United States Health Bill seems near death I feel I can at least point out that as an uninsured, one-person business owner, there didn’t seem to be anything for me.  In fact, since I work for several institutions part time, I was probably looking at a pay cut because these institutions were likely to be required to supply health insurance to their full time employees.  And I’ve heard nothing at all about the role personal conduct plays in health care.  Should we folk who take really good care of our health be paying the medical expenses of people who are sick do to laziness or self-destructive behavior?
Compassion is a natural treasure. But unlimited compassion as an ideal will slowly degenerate a society into fighting and chaos.

Forwarding and Hacking

A person looking for me can now type in http://WeaknessWithaTwist.com and they will automatically be forwarded here.
Also I noticed that somehow a hacker has gotten into at least one of my posts and added at the bottom "and here is an interesting link" --linking of course to some spam. Some images link to spam too. If you see it, I'd appreciate you dropping me a comment because it's subtle, I'm likely to miss it. Once I know about it, it's easy to fix.

Xuan Tian

This is an image of the god Xuantian, (Mysterious heaven).  He is a slightly more martial form of the same god also called Ziwei or Zhenwu (Perfected Warrior).  Xiantian is the god who also goes by the name Xuande (Mysterious Nature), the god who met with Zhang Sanfeng the night before he invented Taijiquan on Wudang Mountian.

The names represent earlier and later parts of our era, times in which the god's job has changed.  Since all the names are still used, he is still available to do all the jobs.