by Andy_S on Thu Dec 12, 2013 1:26 am
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.
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