Oh heck, here’s one more and then the computer must return to stillness.

http://www.wudangtao.com/wuji/

I don’t know too much about the “Wudang” school of taiji per se, but I liked the simple evocative things they write about here.  As with the quantum physics, when I read now about qi work and related issues I’m very pleased to realize that I have a sense of what is being discussed.

Do I know much?  Doubtful.  Like you, I know what I know when I know it.  And the reverse applies with equal force.

The wall that separates one thing from another, may be thick or thin.  Or it may be a gap, not a wall.

What are we caught up in?  Just life.  It contains all the beauty and mystery there is.       Is there an answer for every question?  Nice koan, that.

I’m not spending much time at the computer these days.  But it’s hard to get out of the habit completely.  Tonight I had to send an email about ordering a taiji book and afterward I spent a few minutes googling around.  Found a nice post here, titled “Let Go of the Hand” on the Infinite Spirals blog:

http://www.unixica.com/taiji/2007/11/our_class_tonight_was_almost.html

Nice to read Chen stylists talking along these lines.  The poster, Nasser Manesh, got his start with Yang style (and some mixed forms).  Says he also enjoys setar playing (not sitar), and quantum physics.  Besides being a tech person in business life.

Talking about me for a minute, I was in the food store where I used to buy Inside Kung Fu magazine.  I’m not much interested in IKF anymore, but out of habit I usually stop by the magazine & paperbacks rack.  Saw the new issue of Scientific American, a publication I used to steer clear of because the articles are fairly heavy going, this is not middlebrow stuff and it used to give me a bit of a headache.

But the new article “Quantum Universe — Simple Ways to Create Spacetime” looked mighty intriguing, so I grabbed the sucker and was very pleased to find that I can now digest this kind of material.  Thanks in no small part to taijiquan theory and some of its teacher/exponents, I’m now somewhat able to thrive on these kind of abstruse matters.  Right on.

I’m really looking forward to delving into this article.  Excerpt: “To determine how space sculpts itself, physicists first need a way to describe its shape.  They do so using triangles and their higher-dimensional analogues, a mosaic of which can readily approximate a curved shape…”

And: “Although we usually think of space as mere void, both it and time have and invisible structure that guides how we move — much as the moguls (bumps) on a slope guide a skier.  We perceive this structure as the force of gravity…”

Is this kind of inquiry applicable to taiji?  The martial?  Art?  You bet!  At least, I’m betting on it.  And I dislike gambling.  I want sure winners, for the most part.

Also there’s an article on Neuroscience and Dancing, as well as several other good ones.  Nice to set the sails of the mind, catch the wind, and move out.  As in taiji.

Interesting post by R. Earle Harris from the Inner House Boxing blog:

http://xiong-shan.blogspot.com/2008/04/point.html

Do I agree, disagree?  I don’t think that’s the point really.  We are offered opinions, food for thought, possibly facts, maybe true but maybe not always true?  I like his bit about remaking oneself.  This sounds right, in my experience, which is limited.

Why remake oneself?  Aren’t we OK, as is?  No, it’s good to want to improve.  What’s the alternative — stagnation, right?  No one ever said stagnation was good.  Except a tyrant.  They love stagnation for the rest of us.

Look at it this way.  Life and the world will remake us as time goes by.  It even happens when we’re dead.  Ch-ch-changes, time to face the strange.  So remaking oneself, partially, completely, intermittently, or constantly, at least offers some control, some active participation.  And the hope of adventure.

It’s perhaps noteworthy that these martial arts arose in lands and during times that weren’t overly blessed with personal freedom, individual liberty.  But there is always a way.

In taiji we often hear plenty about the taiji symbol.  Perfectly logical, though not necessarily obvious.  We’re just lucky that there IS a taiji symbol (or taiji diagram) with its simple message, and possibilities for enlightenment.

Maybe we don’t hear so much about the qi symbol or qi character.  But probably hear something.  Possibly even that, like the taiji symbol, the qi symbol has evolved a little over time.  Not the meaning per se, but how the meaning is portrayed, symbolized.

I feel like I’ve learned a lot from the taiji symbol, and can only hope that it translates into actuality through my practice.  By the same token, I feel like there’s a lot to learn from the qi symbol in its various guises, and that there is something important — key — to learn therefrom.

I was going to try to write something based on a tenuous mental flash that I had last night.  But I didn’t really like my notes when I read them.  And I still have a lot to learn.  Am I getting somewhere?  I believe so.  But beginner = beginner and there’s no such thing as a beginner who’s a teacher.  (Unless they’re a beginning teacher.)

But I found this tonight and it looks good:

http://www.buqi.net/en/articles/chi.htm

The section that I quote (below) really hit the spot for me.  I was thinking about vapour last night, in fact I was going to title my post “Rice, Fire, Water, and Steam”.  But forget it, I just need to practice more.

All I can say at the moment is: vapour is not energy.  But did the old Chinese “mean” energy, regardless?  I don’t think so.  Vapour (steam).  Beg (ask).  Reach (go to, extend).  End (conclusion, end point).  Works for me.  Here’s a quote:

Thanks to Rick Matz of Cook Ding’s Kitchen (see blogroll links) I got to hear a great quote from Venerable Master Sheng-yen:

“Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it.Never let it out of your sight. It will take you there.”

And in looking for the source of this wisdom (upon which I hope to contemplate a bit) I found a blog called Tai Chi Cork http://taichicork.blogspot.com/

Tai Chi Cork offerred this advice which I agree with wholeheartedly:

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was ‘Thank You’, that would suffice.”  -  Meister Eckhart

Yay, I remembered to look, and I found it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCEdrVqVkQs

Cassius Clay, AKA Muhammad Ali.  When I was growing up, Muhammad Ali WAS boxing, and a lot of other things besides.  He always will be.

This clip shows some of his superior footwork technique, the “Ali Shuffle”.  This is real black magic.  I’m not qualified to say any more about this one-of-kind champion.

Found a page of quotes from Ali.  Plenty of good ones but for me, this stuck out for some reason:

“A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he’ll never crow. I have seen the light and I’m crowing.”

Be soft.

Breathe easy.

Invite Spirit to rise up and attend.

********************

Gravity is not the enemy.  But it is to be respected.  Don’t make an enemy of gravity by ignoring it.  Ignoring any powerful force — germs; combustability; ignorance — invites danger.

All the universe is knit together by gravitation.  Earth holds sway over us but it is not the only player.  Observe the subtle rising of a million tons of ocean, that cannot resist the call of the moon.  Yet the waters remain rooted.

The heavens above are yin, that’s clear.  So while the insubstantial of my sinks into the earth, the substantial of my ought to draw skyward.  Just a bit.  What’s in the middle is me.  Straight.  Yet curved.

A couple of days ago at work I was pushing a steel cart down aisles of publications, collecting samples for an upcoming trade show.  Not a difficult task, and I’ve done its like many times.  I was under average time pressure.  I felt average good, workaday version.  It was an average day and I was doing average things… but trying to be somewhat better than average, without stressing too much over life in general.

Just a fairly simple task that still had to be done correctly, and with dispatch.  And yet, around me hovered vague possibilities of anxiety, irritation, and physical unease, if I chose to let my spirit weaken a bit through lack of focus or simply catching an inappropriate mood.  I only have to pull orders a few times a year nowadays.  Most of the time I have other more specialized duties.  So here I was doing this infrequent yet totally familiar job.

And a corner of my mind observed myself with this choice of: in-the-zone perfection, or some form of disharmony.  And I was watching my movements a bit, to see if they were high quality, or careless and over-effort-ful.

And suddenly two simple words from taiji training rang in my being.  “Relax completely”.  And suddenly it really made sense for the first time.

We gotta do what we gotta do.  Stand up, work, cook dinner, whatever.  But most of us are reasonably lucky, no one’s shooting at us today.  If no true crisis, we can do best by relaxing.  Completely.  Mind, body, spirit.

My spirits rose a big notch when I finally felt the true truth of “relax completely”.  I had been a bit dense.  I needed to lighten up.  I saw that tension and effort had been hovering nearby me, ready to jump in and ”aid” me at a moment’s notice, if I started to sag a bit or conversely, get brittle.  I didn’t need these hangers-on dogging my footsteps.  I was perfectly capable.  And the way to be more so was to relax.  Completely.

It didn’t require me to flop down on a couch, or go get a massage, or take a nap.  I could stand up, move around, take care of business.  But in a sung way.

I felt some liberation.  People can laugh if they want.  I laughed too!  And though the next couple of days were bitchin’ hot and I had ten thousand things to do, I managed to stay more relaxed.  ‘Cause now I know what the standard is.  Two simple.  I always missed it before but now I might guess that relax is the yang, oddly enough.  “Completely” is the yin.

The most fundamental transition movement is this: lifting one foot off the ground.  Done countless thousands of times in our lives, why shouldn’t it be perfect in every way, like iaido?  But it’s so tempting just to get it over with.

One reason to just “move on” would be to avoid balance issues.  This is basic stuff, I don’t claim to be making some amazing observations here.  I have pretty good balance, but I found that sometimes in taiji class, I would get out of balance.  Not out of exquisite balance, but out of plain old everyday balance.  The culprit is lifting that darn foot… without doing the internal things (there are planty of choices) that need to precede and/or accompany initiating a step.

In other words, to simply go ahead and “step” is already a fault.  We tend to get away with this in everyday life because you can just plunk ‘er down again…. mission accomplished, no worries.

So in a sense, taiji equates to learning to walk all over again, with a bigger, clumsier grown-up body this time.  No doubt this observation is also unoriginal.  I’ve just been trying to consider it anew.

Then again, there’s also the aspect of why move if you don’t have to.  But that harks back to must learn form to be shapeless, must learn the movements to acquire stillness.

Thanks to an interesting discussion going on over at Formosa Neijia, I learned of this:

http://www.thebigview.com/buddhism/emptiness.html

This link came from here:

http://formosaneijia.com/2008/06/14/confusing-form-for-function/

I liked this comment (excerpt) from BL:  >>>”To reach formlessness one must have a form to be free from.”<<<

My analyzing mind thought: But, there’s another way to be formless, a very easy way.  Just have no form worth mentioning in the first place.  Presto!

But then you haven’t “reached” anything.  Not interested, can’t be bothered.  Even the craziest streetfighter rises above this level of who-needs-methods.

Rising above the base has its benefits.  And thus the martial arts were born.

But some philosophers tell us that what’s needed is not a departure, but a returning.

How to discover the truth?