Martial Development

Which schools specifically, please?

One should always make the best of a bad situation. To do anything less is to waste a precious opportunity, which seems a bit low to me. "Heaven-and-earth is not sentimental..." Unless you think this swine flu is a global Taoist conspiracy, created just to bank profits on protective Fu?

You have thereby saved the lives of a few dozen aphids, flies, mites, and other spiders. Be sure to include that in your karmic calculations.

No wonder nobody comes here anymore. It's too crowded!

Short maybe, but miserable? I do not think that word means what you think it means.

When looking for advice, you'll get what you pay for. When giving advice, try it first. When in a fight, remember the Alamo. When fighting more than one person, practice compassion and let a few escape. When choosing a teacher, allow for mistakes. If you meet someone and fall in love: congratulations! When you have nothing to do, count your blessings. When you feel life is testing you, copy the smart kid. When you have to do something that you are afraid of, consider the alternatives. When people don't agree with the way you live, you are in good company.

LULZ I just want everyone to know, I am not going to comment in this thread. But I totally could if I wanted to! P.S. I am kewl

Well, that is not exactly true, but luckily it IS safe to assume.

I suspect much of the humor was unintentional. For example, Bill Maher's comment: "Why do these prophets always seem to hear the message while they are wandering alone in the desert? Isn't that convenient?" In Bill Maher's world, meat comes from the supermarket, facts from reasoning, and proof from consensus.

Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and David Icke, yes. Taoists and Animists, no. I guess the latter rank below reptilian conspiracies in importance--or maybe Maher couldn't find any foolish enough to participate in his "discussions".

Actually, I think this movie reflects people's distaste for meditative practice, and preference for (shallow) intellectual explorations over experience. They don't want the life, so much as the lifestyle. I have found that most Americans are very uncomfortable following simple and direct meditation instructions, unless they are accompanied by a large dose of theoretical explanation.

If that bleeping film had been my introduction to all the subjects therein, I would have ran fast and hard in the opposite direction. Advertisements and promotions are not always a good thing, nor do they always do more good than harm. Would you hire OJ Simpson to hand out flyers for your massage therapy business?

In Tai Chi, more so than in some other martial arts, you need the hardware before you can run the software. When some goofball walks in off the street with an Atari 2600, and demands that you insert your Blu-Ray DVD, what do you do? You play stupid. You wait for him to leave your class in frustration. You let him go blow smoke in some Internet forum, and thereby become someone else's problem. This is our grand martial tradition. This is the voice of experience talking. And if you don't like it, then take up Krav Maga.

I heard that if you eat 1000 McDonald's cheeseburgers, you turn into the Highlander.

If you can't find a prefab set of practice partners, then you have to build them from the ground up.

I didn't care for the title of the article. "Financial experts" give real experts a bad name. Chemists, for example, are not playing a zero-sum game with each other, and their chemical compounds. Whereas the continued success of the financial industry was predicated on an endless stream of "bigger fools".

If you can be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains, If you can resist complaining, If you can understand when your loved ones are too busy to give you any time, If you can take criticism and blame without resentment, If you can ignore a friend's limited education and never correct him or her, If you can resist treating a rich friend better than a poor friend, If you can face the world without lies and deceit, If you can honestly say that deep in your heart you have no prejudice against creed, color, religion, gender preference, or politics, Then you have almost reached the same level of spiritual development as your dog!

In martial arts, the opponent is never wrong. The practice partner is rarely wrong. Sometimes the student is wrong. But if this person is not your student, then don't bother about that. If this person can stop your technique by simply tensing up, then your technique is flawed. Concentrate on fixing it.

Like pure and natural spring water, like a baby learning how to walk, like an autumn sunset, the Dow is going down.

Hui-Neng? Where have I heard that name before? Oh yeah, he was the the head of a school dedicated to assisting its students. And there was another guy named Hui-Peng, who decided to enlighten himself, by himself. Anyone heard of him? No? Hmm... It is not the same concept, and as I have worked with C++, PHP and SQL myself, I am speaking from experience. Are you speaking from experience?

Drunken Boxing With the Stars

This is the worst example of yellow journalism, no pun intended.

That statement is one of my favorite quotes, so I cannot take all the credit. It refers to a person who explicitly rejects the skills and experience of the...more skillful and experienced. One of the bizarre quirks of the spiritual community, is that so many of its members deny the existence of skill and experience. If that were so, there would be nothing to learn, nothing to unlearn, and nothing to talk about. I do see what you mean, and I have a very different understanding of the Middle Way. I hope to share it in detail some day, but not today. What lies midway between yin and yang? Nothing! There is nothing there! Someone, somewhere, knows something that you do not. This is the closest thing to a guarantee that anyone will encounter in their lifetime. As Confucius said, let that person be your teacher.

Unconditioned, if I have learned anything about martial arts, it is that martial arts are not special. They present an excellent venue for learning how to learn; and unlike in some spiritual schools, there is always a helping hand nearby to shatter your delusions and fantasies. Sure, you can teach yourself SQL, PHP, etc from a book. These subjects are child's play, in comparison to spiritual science. The details of the latter endeavor cannot be found in a book, and will never be found in a book, because the base language is an unwritten one. Now that fact in itself would not, and does not prevent a certain gross level of self-education. But there are limits to self-education. Isn't this obvious? I am using "self" in the conventional sense. One who would use "self" in the transcendental sense cannot deny the value of teachers. That would literally be nonsense.

A poor woman living deep in the mountains needs emergency surgery or her baby may die. And we should compare her to some rich (by her standards) dilettante, who can't be bothered with a few extra keystrokes to locate a proper teacher? What a joke. If you can't teach yourself, is your baby going to die? Is your house going to burn down? No. The self-taught man has a fool for a master.