the rum soaked fist: internal martial arts forum

they went to the wrong seminar

Excuse me (better not, no) for sounding skeptical and being tickled pink but mime is not part of this.
This is a travesty of dumbfoundment, if there is or was ever a case for it.

Empty force failed against a non-believer?

Quelle surprise!

This is also entertaining


Sounds like Derren Brown is the master of empty force yet I doubt he knows how to fight (that is on the material plane), do a form, throw a real punch or belt up a gi.

I am preparing my astral body to challenge him on the ethereal plane. If I make it back alive I will make sure I post my experience.

just to be clear, all of the teachers shown are fake, what they do is not real?

its not real and yet



ok you guys must be right, who wants to be first to let the Russians know?

Perhaps I can play the peacemaker here by suggesting, again, the cold bucket test. (My original suggestion, many years ago, was a chamber pot test, but I find that most people these days live in developing or developed countries and do not know what I mean.)

In the cold bucket test, the participants, A and B, are not allowed to touch one another in any way. A is armed with a bucket of cold water. B is unarmed, but may use lin kong jin in any way he likes to prevent A from pouring the water on him. Again, the rules are no-touch for both participants.

klonk wrote:In the cold bucket test, the participants, A and B, are not allowed to touch one another in any way. A is armed with a bucket of cold water. B is unarmed, but may use lin kong jin in any way he likes to prevent A from pouring the water on him. Again, the rules are no-touch for both participants.

great idea, do you think the Russians will agree to this?

Who knows? Possibly more to the point, who cares?

the following is not directed at your post, or any post, just the thread in gen.

why is it that when presented with what seems to be some things that look very similar no one wants to address it or mock it ?

I have long since respected much of their work (Systema), even though from what little I've heard about it, it seems to be based on a different idea.
people talk of being warriors, fighters, ect....but when presented with a military unit that uses some of what seem to be
from my POV the same ideas its not held to the same standards as some of the work shown by the Chinese masters, why is that?

Chinese lin kong jin masters don't like sound of the cold bucket test. The same test in America, as we say, gets no traction. In fact, I can't sell the idea anywhere.

There are some good ideas in Systema. Body relaxation, movement as flow, but it differs from Chinese arts in that it contains the Western idea that the hand leads and the body follows. That is not a bad idea, all our swordsmanship is based on it, but when they rediscover lin kong jin, they have found an idea the Chinese have looked at pretty thoroughly for four thousand years, with increasing skepticism.

windwalker wrote:
why is it that when presented with what seems to be some things that look very similar no one wants to address it or mock it ?

This is mostly a Chinese arts bulletin board. Here we mock Chinese arts.

windwalker wrote:just to be clear, all of the teachers shown are fake, what they do is not real?

its not real and yet

ok you guys must be right, who wants to be first to let the Russians know?

By russians I assume you mean systema guys. The sambo guys would not be seen dead doing this (and yes I have trained with some of them).

I enjoyed a couple of exchanges with local systema guys on a matters like this. They explained the need for the attacker to fall over was a very important part of training the flow. They were also very clear - if I was to resist it would not look the same but would look like sparring.

So - are you saying that a person who is not playing the game will fall over himself on the slightest or not touch? They certainly did not think it would work against me and we would simply end up in good old real physical exchanges.

Also it's clear that in the original video post that this categorically only works when a person is not attacking and is actually falling over in a near choreographed way. When they don't play ball things like what happened in the video happen.

Regarding your comment on reality. Well a puppet on string is real. A rabid dog is also real. If you were told that they were going to attack you and you can prepare for it which one would you worry about?

Enjoy!

Gotta remember to raise my toe!

Windwalker:

RE: Warriors, military units, EF, etc
Sure, some of the Russian special units train Systema. And some of what Ryabko shows is both suspicious and skillfull.

But I VERY much doubt that a single Russian soldier would expect EF to work in life-or-death combat. Equally I doubt that ANY Russian military unit - even the most special of Spetznaz - spends much (if any) of its training time working on EF, though I am sure they do practice other aspects of Systema and Sambo: The Afghan Mujahideen said that they Russian Spetznaz units were very aggressive during close combat.

FYI and FWIW:

I once trained with a master of CMA here in South Korea who also did a lot of qigong, TCM and related practices. In his demos, his students really would fall down and around thanks to his EF. I asked one student about this and he said that yes, sure enough, invisible energy was making him move. As it happened, I was a private student of the master (doing Bagua) and I was, in all modesty, a far more advanced practitioner and better fighter than the student just mentioned.

So once, when it was just the two of us, I politely asked this master to demo EF on me. He said, OK, and stood about 3-4 meters away. I stood in a neutral stance with my eyes closed. Well for a few minutes I stood there and felt absolutely nothing. I was frankly disappointed: I really would like to have beheld some kind of unexplainable power. (I have since wondered if EF is based upon visual cues).

He shrugged it off and said it did not work on everyone. I left it at that, as I was perfectly happy with what I was learning from him, which had nothing to do with EF.

Klonk:

The "jug of water test" was actually used before a packed audience by a certain non-BS Taiji master Dan Docherty. When a well-known Chinese gigong master who claimed to be able to do EF was giving a lecture to a packed auditorium at the University of Southampton (IIRC), Docherty walked up to him with a jug of water in his hand, told him exactly what he was about to do, told him to prepare himself with his EF if he could - then calmly poured the entire jug over the master's head.

Alas, no EF was deployed to stop the guy getting wet and looking ridiculous.

Funnily enough, a group of believers were furious at Docherty's behavior, even though he had (one supposes) shown the emptiness of EF and presumably saved them a lot of money and time spent learning a useless, probably non-existent and frankly laughable skill. The photos of the water jug incident are still probably floating around the Interweb somewhere.