Acupunk wrote:For me I feel as if though Bruce lee had grasped it but not through thousands of years of time tested experience. So it was as if his pressure(qi) was to high for his body to handle. Thus he was like a vb body with a rolls royce engine. They must both be developed with respect to each other.
That's a beautiful summary Acupunk of my views on Bruce too. Even in martial arts, Yi/personal signification and Fang/past community knowledge are good to be balanced.
I feel this is also potentially one of the problems with avant-garde approaches to therapy, ie. modern "energy" work, not just those derived from Eastern lineages, when they try to completely supercede those lineages and work off only a relatively superficial grasp of them. The fact that "it feels good" immediately is not the whole picture, and no assurance at all that we haven't detrimentally drawn on other things underneath that we have yet learnt to see, and the consequences of which we have yet learnt to connect. That's where the accumulated "thousands of years of time tested experience" comes in handy (if one goes to the effort to learn how to interpret them anyway).
The "It works" defence is not only dodgy from an objective scientific standpoint, it is also problematic from a classicist's point of view. There is a price to be paid for the many benefits of internal training... even if it seems to "feel good" immediately, have no doubt it can be dangerous stuff that demands respect and careful discrimination in what one chooses to do (and with whom). Remember, Qi is "energy", not energy, and (if nothing else) flowing through more Qi can burn more Jing. Qigong and meditation and martial arts and chakra work and "letting go of emotions", etc are not always benign, Chinese culture (popularly through literature and mythology) still understands that there are all sorts of ugly turns that can be taken. And I can think of few better ways to see this ourselves than a continually wider and deeper embrace of the existing literary tradition.
Personally, I'd be happier to see CM in the hands of modern scientific scepticism than those who believe classics but don't really try to deeply understand them (or at least try to stay in healthy contact with those that do). Even if a great deal of potential is lost in this strategy, at least modern scientific scepticism, in avoiding this side of traditional knowledge, also steers away from the (subtle, thus even more influential) dangers.
