Identity and Cosmology

From about the age of two, we start carrying things around.  These are our things.  These things are somewhat like the 150 or so people we recognize as our group, and the much smaller bunch of people we call family and friends.  Belonging is not the same thing as owning, but it takes up space in our body memory in a similar way.  We carry these identity objects around with us.  I know what books I have on my shelf even when I’m a thousand miles away.  When I go backpacking I know that I’m carrying 42 things and I know exactly where each of them is.  

This stuff we carry around is the stuff of our identity.  Likewise we learn ways of walking that match up with the groups we belong to.  We learn ways of holding our head that communicate who we are and our status within these groups.  Identity changes when it is confronted by reality.  Sometimes it changes fluidly, sometimes it is very resistant to change.

Our place in a family seems stable, and may in fact be stable for a very long time, but it is what it is because we agree that it is.  It can be disturbed.  Certainly the things we own can come and go, some things much more easily than others.

Identity floats on the edge of the unconscious.

Cosmology is similar to identity.  In its simplest form it is just the world around us.  In reality we only see a very small field of our vision in focus, we only feel contact on our skin, but our mind imagines a much bigger field in focus and sensory awareness all of the time.  The feeling of the world around us is a very strong feeling.  

I’m sitting in a cafe right now looking out the window, but I have a strong feeling sense of where the espresso machine is behind me, also where the bathroom door is and how many tables are in the corner.  Now it is entirely possible that someone just moved the tables (I’m wearing ear plugs) or stole the espresso machine, and if I were to turn around right now and see those things gone it would be a shock (Don’t worry, I just checked and they are all still there.)  This kind of cosmological presence is entirely in my mind, yet it is somehow stored in my body.  I can very clearly imagine the feeling in my body of walking up the carpeted stairs in the three story house I grew up in, I can even remember the feeling of wrestling on and rolling down those stairs.  If I were to go visit that house and find that it had been torn down I would still have these feelings.  

The sun and the moon both move “across” the sky.  Our feeling of the sky is the beginnings of cosmological awareness.  The word “across” is in fact a pretty vague concept, but we all know what it means.  That’s cosmology.  At some point we learn or we envision that the sun and the moon go around the earth.  And then we learn that the earth is actually spinning and that while it is spinning around itself it is also spinning around the sun, and that the sun is spinning around the universe and that the universe is expanding.  

Cosmology also floats on the edge of the unconscious.

Identity and cosmology often overlap.  For instance, part of what we think we know about muscles is cosmology, part of it is identity.  Part of the concept “muscles” is found in how our body feels, part of it is the way we feel emotionally about our bodies, and part of it is how we understand muscles to function in relationship to movement.  Each of these experiences has a kind of built on top of, interwoven layered quality.  It is part identity, and part cosmology.  We pick up part of this “muscles” concept and carry it around as an aspect of identity, it has changed a few times since we first picked it up at around age four.  Our cosmological notion of muscle functionality has also been changing with the accumulation of knowledge and experience.  

Identity and cosmology are both vulnerable to reality.  They can be altered, torn down, shocked, disturbed, wrangled, bolstered, tested, and abandoned.  

I bring all this to my reader’s attention because I want to say something about the roles of teacher and student.  

In the professional dance world, a complement teachers would bandy about fairly regularly was, “I like the way you take correction.”  This complement signified that the dance student was receptive to changes.  Perhaps it also signified a degree of fluidity in identity and cosmology.

My job as a martial arts teacher is to identify the student’s problem, and then to state, demonstrate, or show him or her what is right and what is wrong.  9 times out of 10 this will challenge the identity of the student to some degree.

The student’s job in this identity challenging situation is to understand why a particular attribute or action is correct and why another is incorrect.  It is not usually the student’s responsibility to fix the problem on the spot, but rather to recognize the quality or attribute in question.  

Another part of my job as a teacher is to keep changing metaphors, descriptions and activities until the student sees or feels something new.  9 times out of 10 this is a challenge to cosmology.

The student’s job is to appropriate this new cosmological “idea” or “experience” into his or her daily practice.  That generally involves some kind of perceptual shift, which, with practice, becomes a new way of being.

Change can be fun and/or scary or subtle and/or unconscious.  I suppose that sometimes identity and cosmology shift in gradual ways and other times they make quantum leaps.  I suspect that it is a teacher’s sensitivity to the process of these changes that makes him or her a good teacher.  As Keith Johnstone  put it:  Teaching is not a substance, of which a little bit is good and a lot is better--bad teaching is deeply harmful!

Identity and cosmology (this is from Daoism now) are illusions maintained by effort.  That effort requires energy from food and the (original qi) stuff we have stored deep in our kidneys.  When we weaken ourselves carefully, we automatically put less effort into identity and cosmology making them slightly more vulnerable to softening and flexibility.  But of course becoming too weak too suddenly can cause a sudden collapse of identity or cosmology leading to a kind of snap back, effectively strengthening our perceptions of self and world.   We evolved this way because it was good for survival.  For instance, when we have a close shave with death, the moment we are safe our bodies release hormones in our blood which cause us to feel strong family-like bonds with whoever we happens to be with, changing our identity to improve our survival.   

In case you are wondering, there is a short cut to all of this.  It is to become completely empty in totally undifferentiated chaos.  That, by the way, is what the name Tai Chi actually means.

Internal Power 101

Hey Everybody!  I'm teaching a workshop called Internal Power 101

At Soja Martial Arts

Sunday 12/2/2012 

 From: 11:00 am - 5:00 pm

Soja is located at:  2406 Webster, Oakland, CA, 94612 between 24th & 25th Streets.

The workshop will be an overview of the power generation methods used in all traditional Chinese martial arts: Tai Chi, Xingyi, and Bagua Zhang. 

Workshop cost: $90 for non Soja Members, 10% off for Soja current Adult members.

Here is the skinny:

What is perfect structure and what are its limits? Laozi said, “Knowing when to stop is wisdom.” How do we know when we’ve had enough of a particular type of training? How is it possible to have a calm body and a wild mind at the same time? How can we prepare emotionally and physically for the hardships which happen after a violent encounter? Is it possible to attack in such a way that the opponent can not figure out how to resist? How can a martial art be consistent with the Daoist cultivation of emptiness (xu-kong), non-aggression (wuwei), and natural spontaneity (ziran)? 

Because comprehending a kinesthetic idea requires actually being able to do it, the answers to these questions became a list of solo and partnered experiments that fall into three general categories:

Jing 精- Discovering the underlying structure expressed in traditional Chinese concepts of anatomy and physiology through the exploration and testing of daoyin and shaolin movements and postures.

Qi 氣- Dissolving conscious and unconscious tension in the body in order to reveal the unconditioned freedom of our water-baby-like original nature.

Shen 神- The development of an active spatial awareness which is unconstrained by the trances of everyday living.

11 am - 5:30 pm  6 hours with an hour lunch break (12:30-1:30) $80 (early registration) or $90 after.

 

Please note:  Soja does not offer refunds for this workshop for any reason, but in case your schedule changes at the last minute in most cases we will apply your funds toward future workshops or regularly scheduled classes.

Scott P. Phillips taught the Tai Chi and Qigong programs at the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, before that he spent ten years studying Daoism with Liu Ming the founder of Five Branches University, and he has practiced martial arts all of his life. He is a senior student of renowned masters George Xu and Bing Gong. He has an extensive background in ethnic dance and improvisational theater, and also teaches Baguazhang, Luihe Xinyi, Yiquan standing meditation, Northern Shaolin as a performing art, and Daoyin.

Sign up by calling: Peter at 510.832.7652    

or Emailing:  info@sojamartialarts.com

or got to SojaMartialArts.com and click through to Schedule/Adult Workshops.

Self-Defenseless

I predict that in my lifetime not knowing self-defense will become like illiteracy was 100 or so years ago.  

If you line up the arguments for teaching everyone self-defense and the arguments against, side by side, the arguments in favor are much stronger.  Sometime back in the 1990’s my former stepmother (who is an internationally known civil rights lawyer and can be seen eating cookies in a Michael Moore movie) and I were discussing sexual politics, date rape, and behavioral norms.  I said something on the order of, “The solution is to teach everyone self-defense.”  

Now, at that time, the apocalypse was a distant unlikelihood, Buffy had not yet staked a single vampire, nerds were still nerds, and nobody even knew how zombies were created. 

There was no internet, no youtube, nobody had a video cell phone, no Rory Miller, no Devi Protect, and no Gift of Fear.  There were Wimin’s self-defense classes at that time, like IMPACT which started in 1985, along with loud whistles, mace, and permanent ink spray.  

But there wasn’t to my knowledge anyone explaining in plain legal language, the way they regularly do on cop shows today, the importance of Intent, Means, Opportunity, and Preclusion.  Outside of castle law, back then, the “right to self-defense” was down right murky.  The difference between predator violence and social violence was unexplored territory in the popular imagination.  There was also no popular critique of terms like victim and victimizer, they were as irony-free in normal conversation as “bread & butter.”

At the time I was practicing martial arts and dance about 8 hours a day and since I didn’t believe in cars, I was riding my bicycle or my skateboard everywhere.  

My former stepmother’s response to my suggestion that everyone learn self-defense was memorable, “Women will never be equal to men in physical strength, and besides it is totally impractical.”

I knew then that she was wrong, but I didn’t have the arguments or the examples to prove my point.  If self-defense was the equivalent of becoming a skillful martial artist practicing for hours everyday, she might have had a point.  But it turns out that self-defense is really much more like a form of literacy.  It is a way of thinking about and seeing the world.  Surely it involves martial arts skills to some degree, but it is a mistake to think that self-defense skills require you to be superior in any physical sense. 

The arguments for teaching these skills to everyone before they reach puberty are getting stronger as the list of topics that should be included in a basic self-defense education grows: Good guy modeling, monkey dance awareness, personal responsibility, emotional bio-chemistry, the nature of autonomy, cultural and social “othering,” citizenship, talking to the authorities, the cultural and historical links between fighting, dancing and improvisation, etc, etc, etc... 

Thinking back on her comments that day, it is striking how similar the old arguments against teaching women how to read are to the arguments against teaching women self-defense.  

In fact, I would like to caution anyone who uses the “totally impractical” argument  to look back at all the people who were later face-palmed by inspired people who didn’t seem to notice that impracticality was an obstacle.  

World Music Festival

The San Francisco World Music Festival Starts tonight.  The theme is Asian Opera.

Check it out.  Reviews to follow.

External Internal Mixes

Just wanted to share this video of one of my class mates from the early 90's.  Stan was a strange kid, about 17 in this video, I remember him having some mental development problems that made him a bit shy and awkward in conversation, but he was fun to practice with.

And here is Shifu Qing Zhong Bao, George Xu's main teacher before George left China around 1980.  He is 95 years old in the video.  Lanshou, the system he is a master of, and the one Stan is demonstrating above, is considered a mixed internal and external system.  Whatever right?  Looks like it is pretty good for health in old age as well as training young people for maximum versatility.  

Theory and Metaphor in Martial Arts

I’ve been trying to write about theory for a few weeks.  The problem is simple, but explaining the problem is not. The problem is that martial arts theories are built on metaphors.  Notice that in the previous sentence we have three metaphors.  “Built” is the most obvious one here, implying that a foundation is laid followed by a construction project.  Another metaphor in the sentence is “problem,” implying perhaps a puzzle requiring contemplation, or alternately an agent causing systematic disruption.  In addition we have “martial” and “arts” nagging for explication, “martial” implying war, and “arts” implying the harnessing of beauty while piling up skills.   

But if we look back at that sentence the most challenging term is “metaphors.”  All theory is built on metaphors, mental constructs in place of actual experiences.  Someone might protest at this point that martial arts can only be based on physics.  But physics is made up of metaphors too; we are a liquid body of mass filled with solids of various densities, structured along lines of potential force and contained by a semi-porous wrapping with an elastic surface tension.  To make that description of the human body useful in martial arts practice it has to be both simplified and abstracted so that possibilities and probabilities can be measured and predicted.  It is a lot more efficient and useful to just say, “Your finger on the end of your arm is the pool cue, and his eye is the ball.”

Metaphors are always imperfect because kinesthetic experiences are far more complex than language.  I suppose someone might want to challenge that statement, but even if we could speak in a language as complex as kinesthetic experience it would have to be robust enough to survive the learning and testing process.  And then there are mundane concepts like communication breakdown.  

So it follows that if we clearly understand a metaphor and we diligently put it into practice, it will fail.  It will fail because it was imperfect to begin with.  It was an inaccurate description of form, method and fruition.  A quick example: Many martial arts schools use the metaphor of circulation, but all the substances which are known to circulate in the body circulate too slowly to be useful outside of passive processes.  If in this case circulate is meant to refer to forces from an opponent being returned to the opponent, the liquid aspect of the metaphor “circulate” is an inadequate description of the aspects of structure and mind necessary to accomplish this function.

The majority of Tai Chi classes are containers for the trivial.  I recently heard about a teacher who had created three “new” tai chi forms, one for diabetes, one for Alzheimer's, and one for Parkinson's disease.  My first thought was, “Wow, cute.”  No doubt there is some talismanic effect from self-selecting to learn and practice a form which has a specific health benefit.  Unless of course you are that person who thinks, “Hey, I did my my diabetes form today, bust out the triple chocolate cake!”

In most of these trivial classes the students simply follow the teacher through the form and get an occasional posture correction.  The same metaphors are repeated ad nauseum; relax, root, flow, spiral, sink, be stable like a mountain, flow like a river.   

The same is true for most martial arts classes.  There is very little metaphor analysis going on.  Some schools frown on talking in class at all.  Some students just want exercise, their base metaphor being, “I am a machine that gets rusty and needs motion and heat (oil?) to maintain optimal functioning.”  Some schools cater to parents metaphorical expectations that their child will become either a robotic fighting machine or a caring disciplined servant of all that is true and good.  Some schools take enormous pride in maintaining the same metaphors over time.  Some schools are proud of their simplicity, others of their clarity.  The more systematic the approach, the more entrenched the metaphors will be.  Rotary Engine

Thus, those of us who can actually think kinesthetically are constantly changing the metaphors we use.  We need to use one metaphor to test another.  The process involves continuously reformulating and refining the metaphors we use, while also pairing and juxtaposing them to birth new metaphors and kill off old ones.

The process of training should allow metaphors to be replaced by precise feelings and experiences.  But both the maintenance of skills as well as the teaching of skills requires that metaphors function as containers for kinesthetic knowledge.  The same is true for those metaphors which define our identity.  The freer we are, the freer we are to change and adapt the metaphors we live by.  

The identity piece is also important because the martial arts we practice transit between cultures which often have different deeply embedded metaphors which can act either as  lubricants or friction in the transmission of ideas.  (For example Chinese language posits that time is a man facing backwards, while English posits time is a man facing forwards.)

I know for sure that if a teacher can describe a kinesthetic experience with perfect clarity it is wrong and it will fail.  It may however, be very, very useful.  Lion's Head Meatballs

Playing with Majia and swords yesterday, she offered the metaphor that if you put your arm too far out to the side it will get ground up in a blender.  Metaphors are so much fun.  George Xu has a similar one; cut off your opponent’s arm with your spinning airplane propeller.  He has a whole bunch of new and unusual metaphors, as well as reformulated and recycled ones.  For instance, be a giant meatball hanging in the sky.  (I believe he is referring to Lion’s Head Meatballs, yum!)  Or, be a tree trunk falling on your opponent when you chop.  Also, use your rotary engine against his piston engine.  And, punch him with three heads and six arms while being empty like Romeo staring at Juliet as it begins to snow.  

Please share your favorite martial arts metaphors.

Thogs

Thogs are unfinished thoughts.  I could let these percilate for a few weeks and perhaps they would turn into full on thoughts, but I've got lot's of other matterial to slice and dice so I'll just toss these ones to the crowd.  

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First up, Neanderthal Martia Arts!  Yes, I know what you are thinking, MMA right?  But no I mean the real thing.  And there are some intreging links about pre-historic giants with popeye arms in the article if you get into it.  

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Then there is Camille Paglia, always a hoot.

My friend Elijah Siegler writing about David Cronenberg and Religion.

This intersting website of temptation.  How do I get a copy of this?

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According to Stanley Fish, there are two types of intellegence, Foxes and Hedgehogs.  Hedgehogs are experts in one thing, one type of thinking.  Foxes are broad thinkers who know a little about a lot of things.  The problem is our current era is creating a lot of fake foxes and imposter hedgehogs!  When you can Facebook-google-Youtube-blog your knowledge it is possilbe to appear to have a type of intellegence you don't really have, at least for a few minutes.  True foxes are very rare.  What is the implication of this for matial arts?

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Look, a free book on Taoist Alchemy!

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If the toughest things about fighting happen after the fight, what can we do to prepare for this?  Does this question lead to a good explanation for the development of internal martial arts and their connection to meditation?

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Vector force from the ground to the point of impact does not contribute to mass unity.  We just can’t get away (whether thinking about avoiding self injury or fighting) from the idea that mass plus velocity equals force.  The larger and more unified the mass, the less it has to gain in velocity to effect an equal amount of force.  Momentum is mass plus acceleration, acceleration is the rate which velocity increases over time, so the more mass unity, the less time or velocity is necessary to exert the same amount of force.  Therefore:  Pushing off the ground with the foot reduces power if it reduces mass unity, which it does if force travels along a line (or a curve) through the body.

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George Xu Workshop

There is a George Xu workshop this weekend in San Francisco, check it out!

Balance is Key

If someone gives me a surprise shove I will likely do a quick jump or stumble and quickly recover my balance on two feet.  The same is true for most people, it’s not a special skill.  No other animal can stand on two feet and take a shove with out falling down, even bears have a high falling down rate.  When we learn to walk as toddlers we naturally train our dantian’s to do this complex job.  The recovery of balance is lightning fast.  If I contemplate the physics of it, there must be an internal counterbalance functioning unconsciously.  Somehow my mass absorbs all the momentum of the push and moves my center of mass very quickly back and forth, up and down and left and right until it is directly above my feet again.  Again, it is too fast to perceive.  What I am aware of is the space around me, perhaps sharp objects, the surface of the ground, a wall or a tree.  My guess is that if I misperceived a slanted wall as vertical, or a sloping ground as level, I might actually fall down or stumble for a bit longer.  But a functioning spatial mind can make corrections very quickly.  In fact, it might actually function better at high speeds.  How else could we explain the ability to run through a forest down a steep hill.  The spatial mind controls the dantian, as a counterweight, unconsciously and instantaneously, bringing us back to balance.  

This basic function of the dantian can be transferred to higher order skills like skiing, carrying a long ladder through an obstacle course, rock climbing or gymnastics.  Of course, all animals have a similar skill which they use on four feet or in the air if they are birds.  

Normal humans however, only use the dantian for this one type of task.  When we throw a ball, or pick up a pen to write our name, we are using our brains in a very different way.  Or, like when we are rock climbing, we use the same set of balance and vertical orientation skills simply applied in a different context.  

Pure Internal Martial Arts are unique because they use the dantian to respond to forces other than gravity.  To paraphrase George Xu, “When you touch any part of my body, you are touching the dantian.”  The best video demonstration of this I know of is this one by Ma Yue Liang:

Not everyone can learn internal martial arts (that would be communism), but proof that nearly everyone has a functioning dantian is apparent in our natural ability to recover our balance.  

Shout Out

Just wanted to give a shout out to another student of George Xu's, Derek Croley: