dspyrido wrote:I'm going to throw this out. When people mention to me - "you can only learn this stuff from a rare master" - I only have one question. Who taught the expert?
In the end and at some point someone figured this out by themselves without the aid of the information that we are exposed to today. I also don't believe for a second that the various lines of masters where all part of the same single line spark that started it all.
So instinct & logic tells me that this is not a concept that can only be transmitted via direct contact with a guru. I don't propose that everyone out there can pick up a book and wuxia themselves into mastery. But the original learning process was and has always been an exercise of serious self discovery that does benefit from a great instructor. In absence of the guru people learn stuff by exploring, exchanging, training hard and testing a lot.
Wrong or right?
More wrong than right.
In principle, yes of course someone had to figure it out to begin with. In practice, these capabilities are developed into a format by people who figured them out as individuals or small groups, but eventually they have to be propagated as a system of knowledge by some kind of inter-generational institution, which can mean a martial arts school and/or a formal religion. The knowledge is propagated because it has inherent value to a group of people who usually recognize first and foremost that the knowledge gives them advantage over other people.
Once this realization is made, the knowledge will be guarded and the advantage it gives becomes a power base that usually corrupts those holding the knowledge. Cue yoda voice. Unless the knowledge is actively used to promote something like health benefits and disseminated widely, as in Chinese Medicine or other useful systems of knowledge that have been successfully propagated and actively used for the benefit of many, the corruption process continues until the institution actively seeks to weaken, dilute, and distort the knowledge in the public domain so as to reinforce their advantage of having much more useful forms of the inherent knowledge and abilities that people have, but need techniques to cultivate.
Please extrapolate the above into your own viewpoint of religious institutions (or military R & D), which are almost always associated with martial arts schools, whose job is to cultivate the knowledge of intrinsic human mental and spiritual power, but who obviously do everything possible to obscure it, then dole it out in a hierarchy, usually teaching it purposefully incorrectly (eg. giving incorrect kundalini training to create sex addicts the way Satanists, Buddhists, or Mantak Chia's books do), and in a very limited way to neophytes so as to obligate them to serve the institution in order to gather enough knowledge to figure out something useful, and by then they are usually corrupted into this "power by advantage" mentality through a system of mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual abuse, as well as rituals, and given mental conditioning to accept the abuse, partly with the implied promise of eventually being able to reciprocate the maltreatment downward to those new recruits of the hierarchy.
End yoda voice. Cue eery music, lol.
Last edited by Michael on Mon Jul 28, 2014 8:57 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Is there any way to anatomically explain how a lump would appear and move around (i.e. is it a blob of muscle? Which muscle would it be?)? My minimal learning only really dealt with the dantian at all - which I guess would be a prerequisite for the other "blob moving"...