Strength

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Yes, you read that correctly, I'm going to talk about strength. 

My history with strength is that as a kid I was always winning those presidential physical fitness awards because I was very active.  I could run long distances, I could do lots of pull ups, I was always the first to the top climbing the rope in gym class.  When I tried out for the football team in high school the coaches looked at me, skinny, and probably thought no way, but I out-ran, out push-upped and out sit-upped all the other try-outs so they had to let me on the team. However, I was even more arrogant then than I am now and I figured why be on a team with all these out of shape losers, so I never went to practice.  

I always had the philosophy that building muscle wasn't necessary, just do the thing and the body will give you what you need.  

In the Sea Scouts I learned a different lesson from solo rowing with an over loaded boat in strong winds and choppy waters.  Strength didn't work.  What did work was perfectly smooth technique.  I trained my rowing crew of 4, one small woman, one very small man, and another man, not so small but smaller than me.  We raced heavy wooden whale boats against teams of 6 guys all bigger than me with big muscles and we won.  They were just bending oars and messing each other up.  We were smooth and steady.  

In my 20's I was an animal.  Dance, martial arts, bicycle riding 8 hours a day.  I never tried to build muscle, I just did the thing.  And I had the energy for it.  Yes, after very intense work outs my body would hurt, but it always hurt so good!

In the realm of martial arts I did get muscles for a few years, but as I got more efficient the muscles got leaner and smoother.  Standing practice, for an hour a day, also healed my injuries.  

As the years went by my power got better, there are many ways of generating large amounts of power that do not require much muscle.  And usually people with big muscles are at a sensitivity disadvantage, they don't feel the changes until it is too late. 

But as I age the injuries keep piling up.  In June I was backpacking with my wife and she was struggling a bit so I was taking more and more of the gear.  Then we got on a route where there wasn't going to be water for two days, so I took enough water for both of us, 2 gallons.  The day was very windy and I took a bad step injuring my knee.  We had planned a lot more backpacking but my knee wasn't up to it.  And then we did a huge amount of driving and I injured my lower back.  Yikes.

Then a month went by, more driving, and nothing was healing.  So I started getting bodywork and talking to my expert friends and finally things started healing.  Then in September I was in a push hands game with someone who really did not want to lose.  After I up rooted him, I put him back on his feet and he kicked me in the knee.  Ow.  I thought: I'm so dumb.  Why did I agree to do this?  Will I ever learn?

After that I was up at this Buddhist Center in Northern California working on my book, and clearing brush.  It was often ice cold in the morning for my workouts and I ended up injuring my other knee too, which made my back hurt again.  That was the first time in my life I had both knees injured at the same time.

None of this actually stopped me from working or moving, it wasn't that bad.  But the healing was really slow.  

All of this got me to reflect on all the crazy stuff I've done.  Pushing my body into crazy pretzels.  All of my dance teachers were adamant that we should never dance on concrete, that it would kill our knees.  But I was doing martial arts outside on concrete everyday.  I learned to land softly.  I figured it was fine.  I also did Kathak, North Indian Classical Dance, which was an exception to the rule about dancing on concrete.  Kathak is done with five pounds of bells on each ankle and barefoot.  Hard smooth surfaces like polished concrete or marble simply make the best sounds.  And like clapping with your hands, you can make loud crisp sounds with your feet without hurting your them.  But sometimes, I got carried away and brused the bones of my feet.  

Anyway I did that fight group in Seattle over Thanksgiving.  I was playing a version of mercy with a guy much bigger than me.  It is a technical trick, it doesn't require strength.  But I realized the guy's hands were so strong that even if he couldn't submit me, he might break the bones in my hand.  Yikes.  And afterwards I really felt that having big relaxed muscles in a well trained body is not the same as just having big muscles.  

So I am here in the Southern Sierra of California in a cabin, still working on my book.  It occurred to me that the injuries I got caused me to significantly limit my movement, and I probably lost a lot of strength.  Strength I never thought about training because I always just had it.

So I've been doing this experiment with strength, it has pretty much healed my injuries in two weeks.  Wow.  

Here is what I did.  Normal martial arts workouts but with the intention of building muscle.  In other words, inefficient movement.  I decided to build up my thighs for instance, engaging the muscles which normally would make the stances harder to do and reduce my range of motion.  But a funny thing happened.  The muscles just got big and then got out of the way.  I realized that with big thigh muscles things like bridges and backbends are easier.  So I started building up my biceps and triceps and doing pull ups and handstand push ups and stuff like that too.  

The thing is I really know how to completely relax, so even with bigger muscles they aren't getting in the way, they are just adding protection.  In a sense I'm not using them, they are just hanging on as support.  

And here is the kicker.  All that qigong and daoyin stuff hadn't been doing much for me for quite awhile.  I long ago fully integrated it into everything I do so it was redundant.  But qigong works wonders on muscle.  I've been pulling out all my old "healing" tricks.

The assumption that tendons and ligaments can do most of the job of muscles was correct, and the efficiency and whole body connection and increased range of motion that comes with that approach are all real, and worth doing.  And there are a lot of cool tricks to be learned from using tendons and ligaments instead of muscle.  But the combination of many years of practice and age takes a toll on those soft tissues.  (I think there are significant hormone shifts that effect changes in soft tissue too, also part of aging.)

I lost my jump!  And I was a jumper, I used to do long strings of split leaps and straddle jumps in rhythm across the dance floor hitting the top of my jumps on the beat. Where did my jump go?

So we will see if I can get that back.  Live and learn.  

Feel free to offer thoughts or advice.  I think I'm a beginner again.  

Straddle Jump!

Some Thoughts for the Wood Horse Year 2014

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For the wood horse year I'm planning something really big, but I'm about to go into solo retreat for a month in the Sierra Nevada first.

The workshop last weekend went really well, basically my theory is that what I've been doing with kids will work even better with adults.  Conditioning not learning.

I have a bunch of links I wanted to share, so here they are.  

The first one is kind of whatever, but I learned that the classic Bruce Lee movie Fists of Fury (remade by Jet Lee), is called Jingwu in Chinese.  Jingwu means Pure Martial, it was the name of the political martial arts movement that was essentially an exorcism of all the yin stuff in martial arts like ground fighting and magic.  

Dog style is one of the surviviors of that purge.  Check it out.  Dogs and pigs were the very lowest status animals, so it is hard to imagine someone wanting to do such a style unless it was a joke, or they themselves were super low status in the society and they were claiming a kind of reverse awesomeness.

This was how some of it came back in a flood in the 1980's, great pictures of Qigong Fever.

This is an awesome return of the pre-20th Century martial arts narrative culture, unfortunately it got removed, a commenter says that seen from the other side there is a beaver visible.  

This is a fun idea for martial artists, con-men and actors alike.

If you are signed up with academia.edu you can get a copy of D.S. Farrer's $200 book Shadows of the Profit: Sufi Mysticism and the Martial Arts, for free as download.  It is about Silat, and looks very interesting.  So does the 45 minute video that goes with it!

And this is just a freaky image of the future for no particular reason.

Enjoy the ride!

 

Conditioning vs. Learning

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I picked up a few different types of outlining software/apps and I'm wondering if it is a good way to produce blog posts.  The theory being that many people actually want to read an idea in outline form, so they can skip to the parts of a text that most interest them.  I think some of my best blog posts have been outlines or frameworks for thinking about larger issues.

  • people get older
    • I'm 46.  There are so many old injuries.  So many ways I've changed my training and movement over the centuries to accommodate damage, love lost, birth defects, growth defects, public face-plants, and failed experiments.  Annoyingly, there are a number of movement experts I've heard lately who when asked about aging answer: "don't get old."  I think that is a lame answer.  Fun people have more rough spots than they can count.  
  • we are broken,
    • I'm a bit broken, this is the first time I've ever injured both knees at the same time. And I injured my lower back too. The healing process has been hap-hazard. I've made progress numerous times only to relapse or create a new problem. I'm an optimist, so if anytime over the last 7 months you asked me, I'd be like, "Hey, I'm healing up pretty well."  Optimism is what people turn to when reality gets in their way.  I'm conditioned to say it, and think it. Intellectually I know it is a bit flawed. But I am also quite optimistic that my current trajectory is really great. That may be part of my self-conditioning to be a teacher. You can't go out and teach today if you think it is going to make you less able to teach next week.
    • But I'm really not kidding, I am totally optimistic about the training I'm doing now. And the embarrassing part of it is that I'm doing some strength training.
    • I think I understand what muscles are supposed to do better than I ever did before. And it is making me a lot more conservative. Not in the, "limit your range" sense, but in the "what shapes should my body be able to attain" sense. Also I'm giving less value to relaxation. Here is why:
    • I think that for any type of conditioning there is a hormone cocktail that is ideal. In other words, if I can trigger the correct hormone cocktail in my body, it will condition itself. Train itself. My body knows what to do. It knows what feedback to seek, it knows what will work. Relaxation as a hormone response is superior to the other types.  That is why I'm going back to the training I had in my early 20's, because I was so unconscious of what I was doing it had to be 90% conditioning anyway.
  • we are often limited by age 7
    • I've spent a lot of time teaching more than a 1000 kids.  Some kids at age 7 (I was one of them) are not able to walk into class and do a full bottom-on-ankles squat.  Most are able to do it as easily as smoking a cigarette or talking on a cell phone.  Some can do a full monkey squat which involves partially dislocating their hip sockets in a squat so that their bottom repositions between their ankles on the floor.  Actually I could make long lists of all the cool stuff outlier 7 year olds can do.  And, I believe that if you give me 7 year olds with very little natural ability, I can still get them doing amazing things.  
  • we can overcome many limits
    • When I started dancing I had no natural flexibility or rhythm, I could however, jump high and I did have superior energy and endurance.  I learned to do the splits, on the floor, in the air, upside down, and sideways.  I also learned one handed handstands, bridges, back walkovers, and handsprings.  And with all that I still couldn't get into a full squat long enough to smoke a cigarette or make a phone call.  We are not all the same.  Because I thought doing pistols and squats were important I pushed myself to figure it out, and eventually, after years of trying, I developed the ability to do a full squat.  But honestly it never became easy.  A lot of the handbalancing stuff was really difficult for me too because I have very little flexion in my wrists.  No exercise I have ever found improved my wrist range.  It still sucks just as much as the day I started.  
  • even if we can overcome major limits, there will be a price to pay
    • I used to say the definition of qigong is whatever you do such that your work/play doesn't leave a mark on your body.  Everywhere I pushed my body to go beyond what it naturally wanted to do, there is a mark.  That's okay, we can push our bodies to do amazing and insanely fun stuff, but there is price.  
  • any solution is temporal
    • All the magical body training I have done has an expiration date on it.  If it improves something, if it fixes something, if it makes something right; it will eventually become the wrong thing to do.  
  • my knowledge, incredible as it is, is contingent on the unknowable
    • I'm speaking here about my ability to train other people.  The more I know, the more I know about what I don't know.  I have always been honest with students about the limits of my knowledge, but experience keeps showing me that the bigger subject is always going to be what I don't know.  As a teacher I want to burn all the "how to" books! 
  • Learning is over rated. 
    •  Why? Because it is conditioning that sets up what we can learn. If you are not conditioned to be curious, you must rely on love and fear to motivate learning. There is a chapter of the Daodejing that explains this.  (The best kind of teacher is like a shadowy presence....the next best uses love, then fear, and finally she just hacks at you!) For some reason unknown to me, most people stop being able to learn in adulthood. This accounts for why people try to hold on to jobs and status and other failed ideas.  It explains why the catch word of my generation is sustainability. So goes the fashion, I go the other way.
  • I'm conditioned to delight in the chaos of not-knowing.
    • I have no way on my own of knowing if my training is a good long term strategy for a given success. The beauty of learning a classical art, from an older person, who learned it from an older person, is the hope that the flawed training strategies would have been throw out at some time over the generations. But it should also be obvious that in an open society there ought to be better ways to come by "better ways to train."
  • All of this has led me to looping. 
    • I'm experimenting with the training I got as a dancer in my early 20's. It is informed, oh boy, oh boy, is it informed by the years, but it is also the same old stuff my body got good at first. There is some trust there I guess.  Or maybe I'm going backwards in hope of getting back to the very beginning before I ever started learning.  
  • In my optimism I see this new way, this spontaneous way.  I see a way to use pure inspiration.  A pathless path.  

Kathak on Afro-Pop World Wide PBS

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One of my mentor teachers, Chitresh Das, is the subject of a documentry about improvisation and a collaboration with an award winning tapdancer.  

The title Upaj, means a musical expression that arises spontaneously and instantaineously from the heart.  

It is showing on PBS today, tomorrow and next monday.  PBS is a government station so it is anyone's guess when it is actually showing.  This page is supposed to tell you.

Commentary to follow when I actually watch it.  But it will be amazing I'm sure.

Martial Arts of the Mind

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Martial arts as a route to enlightenment is a subject I have written about some in the past, and I'm working a bunch of new material into my book.  But this is a pretty great summary of some of the issues, awesome really, Ling Gesar.  The links are easy to follow from there too.

And the Placebo effect is always on my radar.  This is a link to a study by the star of placebo research most people know as the author ofThe Web That Has No Weaver , Ted Kaptchuk.

Basically the new spin on placebo is that it works, so we should use it.  The why and how it works is, at this point, still only explainable via religion (A former stepfather of allopathic medicine I suppose). This is true of the mind in general.  The arrogance of science, or scientism if you prefer, or rational modernity, whatever, simply does not have a metaphor that adequately explains either the mind or consciousness.   We are not really robots or computers or computer-like monkeys. We are what we are, or, as Popeye was fond of quoting Torah:  I yam what I yam.  

I also heard a metaphor people might like to consider.  You know how we talk about twenty year olds who can call in 3 laser guided smart bombs in like 10 minutes in Afghanistan at like a million dollars a pop?  Well that's what it is like for Doctors in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU).  They are calling in smart bomb medicine every time they push a button, like a million dollars a pop.  If you've been to the ICU, whether you are a pauper or a prince, you are now probably worth more than the Six Million Dollar Man!  And all the savings we can pile up in every other type of medicine will be used up in two days in the ICU. And it is getting more expensive everyday because they are inventing new machines all the time.  And yes, most of that money gets spent on people at the very end of their lives.  I don't know, it seems like this ought to lead to some moral discussion here.  Like perhaps we could pay people to wear Do not resuscitate wrist bands?  Or at least give them a tax break?

I've been working through some vocabulary problems, "popular" religion vs. "village" religion, verses the clerical lineages, verses text based traditions, verses movement based traditions...anyway, I like the term "temple religion" and when I Googled it I got "temple culture" and a video from my friend Fabian who does wonderful work:

My father recently linked to this article about Aging Baby Boomers in the Housing Market.  Over the next 3-5 years we are going through a massive inversion!  Retired people will suddenly out-number working people by a large ratio.  The ratio just started flipping out!  Consensus housing, consensus religion, consensus rock, consensus exercise, consensus marriage, education, medicine, crime, and consensus marital arts--it's all flipping out!  It's going to change big and change fast.  What do you think? 

United States birth rate (births per 1000 population).[3] The United States Census Bureau defines the demographic birth boom as between 1946 and 1964[4] (red).

 

Updates

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Yikes, I haven't posted a blog in over a month.  I'm still working on a book.  For January I'm house sitting South of San Francisco.  I'm trying to write all day, everyday.  In February I'm going to stay in a home in the Southern Sierra Nevada and after that I'm not sure.  It depends on whether my book is finished.

I am teaching a half day workshop.  I get so much pleasure out of teaching, I really miss it:

 Jan. 26th, 2014  12-3PM  $35  at Soja in Oakland, CA  (click on Adult Workshops and scroll down)
The purpose of playing games is to have as much fun as possible and to unleash spontaneity which is the only proof we have that we are not robots.  When we get rid of fear and replace it with exhilaration, competitiveness melts away, leaving behind a joyful cooperative buzz that lasts for days. The martial arts skills we condition and test in games are the skills we trust the most.
 
Traditionally folks retreated to the quiet mountains to meditate and find equanimity, but martial artists were rebel tricksters who instead invented games that are sneaky down and dirty short-cuts to enlightenment. They are the quick and easy route to joyful comfort in our bodies, discarding limitation, and entering the Void via a secret door.

We will particularly work with creating positive stimulation via soft hand slapping, unbalancing, and games that condition speed with relaxation and increase spatial awareness. Come ready to play, invent and develop ways to improve martial arts games. Bring your own funny bone, you may have the opportunity to hit someone with it.

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Also, a giant in the world of martial arts passed away this morning.  A true hero in the worlds of kungfu, commerce and entertainment.

Run Run Shaw 1907-2014

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I want to give a plug to Rafe Kelley and his Good Men Project,  he also has a business called Evolve Move Play.  His latest blog post is right on!  I nearly got ejected from a Christmas Dinner for saying the same thing, albeit in more provocative terms.  Well, and also I did punch someone as a way of answering the question: "Why is fighting essential for emotional and intellectual development?"  Hey, a single punch is worth a thousand words, right?  Why We Need a Little Roughhousing!

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I'm presenting a paper on the Theatrical and Religious origins of Taijiquan and doing a workshop in Boston at the:

Tradition and Transition 9th International Conference on Daoist Studies Boston University, May 29-June 1, 2014 

These conferences are a lot of fun, I hope to meet some of my East Coast friends and readers while I'm there!

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I would have more to say, but... my Apple Stickies program crashed with about 7 half-finished blog posts, sooooo 2003. amirite?

Don't worry, I have numerous blog posts still spinning in my head and I'll have them up soon.

 

 

Silence in Golden, Duct Tape is Silver

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This post is entirely free of romanticism.  It points to a new super charged modernity of pure martial arts.  

Three days have passed...

since...  

I recently got to visit a secret society of violence experimentation.  I'm 5'11'' and 160lbs.  The guys I was playing with have a ton of experience with actual violence and averaged 6'3'' and 230lbs.  Each was different and has a unique story but the results on my end were:  6 choke outs.  20 throat pokes.  Head butt to the nose and the eye socket.  Nose and jaw rubbed into the ground.  A knee bouncing up and down on my solar plexus.  Random pain compliance.  Balls kneed and squeezed.  Floor impact.  Chest compressed to the point of no inhale do to excessive weight.  A mildly dislocated shoulder.  And 3 accidental chiropractic adjustments.  

I mention all this because none of it is actual damage, but my mind read it as damage at the time.  Well, I had a bit of vertigo this morning and my nose has some free floating bits of cartilage, and maybe my shoulder isn't quite where it should be, but over all I feel great.

Several of the most experienced guys I was playing with claimed they had no hormonal response.  They say fighting with another person is like fighting with a teddy bear, they don't see another person there so they are not triggered emotionally or socially.  That's pretty amazing.  They, in some sense, are able to shed their identity so that fighting is just what normal feels like.

Over all the feed back I got was very positive.  My skills and training are great.  The problem is that when I'm taking what I perceive to be damage I become more of a monkey, that is, I start reacting instead of fighting the way I'm trained to do.  Getting poked in the throat in this case was not doing real damage but it freaked me out.  Taking five or six body shots in a row, in this case, wasn't damage but believing it was made me fight poorly.  

But what is most interesting to me is tracking how I feel.

First off there was the enjoyment of my failures and feelings of appreciation for the folks helping me with that.  The first session went until 2 AM so there was some exhilaration, and a kind of body looseness that happens when I'm passed tired.  That seems like 3 or 4 hormone combinations right there.  But I'm pretty sure that my social challenge autopilot-- I need to be tougher than you-- hormones didn't flood my system.  That's a very important detail.

From 8 in the morning we went until about 1 pm.  Some nausea, lots of need to drink fluids.  Perhaps that had something to do with the whiskey the night before.  More simple feelings of fun and enjoyment.  Then that evening I was just feeling elated.  Tired but extra friendly.  I was in pain  all over, one arm was barely functional and my face felt bruised, but the pain was mixed with some hormone that made me feel really good.  Perhaps I felt socially bigger then normal, unflappable.

All the next day I was happy about being in pain.  Every time I felt pain, it was accompanied by joy.  And then I had a new effect.  My body wanted resistance.  Not push ups or squeezing or jumping around, or powering through.  My body wanted dynamic resistance all over.  It was perhaps like being a kid and wanting to be tickled, very dynamic and unpredictable.  And a bit like wanting to wrestle, but different from wanting to physically dominate.  This deep physical desire was my body wanting to relax against dynamic and chaotic oppositional forces.  

That last one was a very cool feeling.  Unfortunately I only had my wife around to play with, but she indulged me for a few minutes and that made me very happy.  I believe that whatever that hormone combination was, it is probably key to the highest levels of martial arts training.  It's as if once I got there my body already knew how to make up games that would condition me for optimum battle skills.  I should add here that this hormone inspired feeling is related to what I have elsewhere described as a separation of the inner and outer body, distilling jing and qi in motion.  The version I practice without the hormone inspiration feels like the mass of muscle and bone is a dull container driven by an inner body that can not be easily caught because it is moving around inside, like a separate body.

The next day (two days after) I had mostly come down from the high but I felt heroic and larger than normal.  My body had mostly healed but the pain I still had bothered me more, it had migrated.  My limbs and my face felt better but my chest felt stiff and compressed.  Not a big deal from a healing point of view because bruises on the torso get great blood circulation.  I did a lot of chest loosening exercises and felt fine.  But later in the day I had a very strong sensation around my chest and heart.  A new hormone.  I felt hollow.  Longing.  Like I'd been emotionally crushed, but just as a sensation.  I wanted to be held and gently caressed, it felt childish.  Vulnerable.  Like I wanted to be inside and then inside again.  

Three days later all the effects are gone.

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Comments. 

Many if not all of these hormones have been isolated and probably can be injected into the blood.  I think taking hormones could be a really smart way to train but just look at how many changes I went through, it would require very complex monitoring.  

Understanding how to trigger (or not trigger) the hormones and then not over doing it is probably a better route.  We should consider monitoring these hormones in students too.  Right now there is potentially inexpensive technology that can tell you all the hormone concentrations in your blood in about an hour.  We just have to create the market for it.  

There are so many implications for education and learning in general here.  Imagine a school where subjects are taught only when the student's hormone profile is at its optimum for that subject?  If, for instance, your hormones are primed for mathematical thinking, you would likely invent the games that would teach you everything you need to know as long as you had the inputs/problems/proofs/tools available.  Imagine a speed reading class that focussed on getting you to the right hormone balance before trying to teach you anything.  My guess is the very best teachers all do this intuitively already.

The opposite, having exactly the wrong hormone profile for a particular type of learning would be a pure disaster.

Nothing here is new.  All the feelings I've described are part of NORMAL.  But conscious discussions of how to optimize these feelings for specific results needs a lot more attention and naming.

I suspect that traditional ritual behavior and ritual design is deeply tied up with conditioning people via hormone responses.  Some rituals require a big crowd because that triggers certain hormones.  A wedding for instance, is meant to permanently seal a social bond in the mind of everyone present.  An execution follows a similar logic.  There are countless other examples.  Secrets and secret rituals must be a different combination of hormones.  I don't want to simplify this to the point of triviality, but enlightenment may just be a relationship to hormones.  That doesn't mean we all have access to it or even care to.  This is just a line of thinking.  

Again, this is nothing new, A Brave New World, and A Clockwork Orange were built around this theme.  Two early scifi's that crossed the blood-brain barrier into literature, from low brow to high brow. Which brings us to the title of this post.

Silence is golden,

Duct tape is silver

     (an original poem) by Sgt. Rory Miller

How I became Enlightened

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So if you have some time for entertainment watch the video of this 11 year old kid's TED talk.  His story is here! and worth a quick read too.  He is not actually a kid, he is an emanation of the Dao!  The take away from his talk is very simple, STOP LEARNING!

 

Of course the obvious corollary to this kid's video is: stop teaching.

The common response to someone who says, I'm not interested in learning, is, you're so arrogant everyone can benefit from learning.  Not true.  In learning, as in fighting, time is damage.

Particularly when it comes to meeting new experts or masters, everyone will tell you to show up with an empty cup. How can you learn if your cup is already full? they say.  The propagators of upright conduct will tell you that if you show up with an agenda it will obscure your ability to see what is there.

But I say nay! show up with a full cup and if you are lucky it will get spilled! The purpose of a class is to compare what is in your cup to what is in the cups of other people in the class, including the teacher.  It is a place to compare notes, to test your experiences against the experiences of others.  Who wants to teach people with empty cups?  That's boring.

I've spent the last three months working on a book while staying and clearing brush at a Buddhist Retreat Center.  There is a substantial library here and I've had a chance to interact with lots of people on the subject of enlightenment.  But actually I already had incredible resources among my friends and family.  

One of the many arguments spinning around is whether one needs to be subordinate to a teacher in order to pick up enlightenment skills.  The best argument is that the default relationship in our society is equality and friendship.  But to become enlightened your teacher may need to tell you that you are an idiot, a blind fool and a moral disgrace, for example.  In our cultural milieu of equality as a default, those kinds of words would end the relationship, so you need to be subordinate to the teacher.  Interestingly however, all of these enlightenment traditions come from Asia where hierarchy is the default relationship.  This creates all kinds of confusion.  They obviously have to overcome the hierarchy thing to become enlightened.  So my conclusion is that whatever ones default relationship to a teacher or a teaching is, has to be overcome.  It has to be overcome because it is an illusion and illusions take an enormous amount of effort to maintain.  However, if it is a default illusion, one everyone else in your culture shares, than that effort is a BLIND SPOT, and you won't even know you are exerting that effort!

The other interesting argument spinning around is about how you might know if someone is enlightened.

Here is a talk by the Buddhist Geek Society about the science of enlightenment:

http://www.buddhistgeeks.org/audio/Episode266_Mindful_Binge_Drinking_and_Blobology.mp3

What a mess!  What a mess!  Here is my take.  The only test we have for enlightenment that has any meaning has to do with how a person handles change.  Particularly changes to ones identity.  So to test for enlightenment we have to confront a person with a direct challenge to their world view.  We push them past their limits and see how they adapt.  Facing death head on would be good but perhaps impractical.  We could perhaps have them talk to a rapist who not only loves raping but thinks it is the funniest thing he has ever done or will ever do in his life.  It kind of depends on the person, I can think of a lot of things that would shock other people into an identity coma, but it's much harder to think of such a thing for myself.  Anyway, once we solve the sampling problem (from the mp3 talk) and the control problem (also from the mp3) then we can come up with a list of things likely to knock someone's identity into next Thursday and see if they react differently then people who have not had 5+ years of enlightenment hazing.

That's all folks!