Sloppy Zhang

First time seeing that vid too, interesting. I guess they turned on a light right as he started doing the first thing.... 'cause the room got really bright as soon as got into it, and I was like, "HOLY CRAP! wait.... was that just someone turning on the light?" but otherwise fairly interesting. I think what he was talking about at 00:24 was this is what you get by mixing *something* (probably Kunlun? Sound was low on that one) and Maoshan. That's just what I heard though.

I haven't had any experience with the Bujinkan, I've seen some stuff, but I'm not one to make comparisons, so I'll just say what I know about Hayes' stuff. I think I should say the only experience with To Shin Do I've had has been with DVD's. However, I've experienced dozens of martial arts, with dozens of teachers, in various schools throughout my life. Some of them taught good techniques, but had really sketchy vibes (as in, they liked to hurt people for fun), others just didn't know what they were doing. Hayes seemed like a guy who knew what he was doing and didn't enjoy hurting people for fun, so a double plus! The other thing that he stressed with To Shin Do is it's not about forms or techniques, but about "answers to questions." What are you most likely to encounter in a real situation? Someone grabs you. What do you do? What if he does this? What if he's bigger? What if you are against a wall and can't do this? He shows a technique, but then immediately after follows up with "let's look at what else might happen...." I've found a lot of teachers I've had would show a technique, and then a student would say, "what about this...?" I found with Hayes that the answers to those questions came naturally, and realistically. As for traditional stuff, he does teach that at higher levels, the forms, katas, weapons, stuff like that. But for the people just getting the started, the first major emphasis is: what are you going to REALLY see? And what can you realistically do without having to dump 10 years into body conditioning to be able to do a specific technique? Again, I'm not trying to make comparisons, just describing it how it is. And you're right about it being fluid and natural, a lot of it is about natural body movement that everyone can do naturally already as soon as they walk in the door (or watch the DVD as it were ) I should also say that I've had no problems learning from the DVD. Anyone with enough martial arts experience to know how to move their body, look at their alignment, make changes, observe a technique, then recreate it, know distancing/timing with an opponent, can learn this stuff, even better if you have a training buddy that can do that stuff too.

Thank you very much for that description! Don't practice Kunlun with Max or anyone, as I've said before, every once in a while my interest gets peaked, but I'm holding off on it till I get through some other stuff and figure things out. That being said, I still like to get as much info on something before I get too invested in it (money's tight at the moment for me, so that goes double as well), so thanks for clearing that stuff up

Again, this is something I read/was told on some other threads in the past, but the teachers that taught Max don't really teach publicly. Like, Max was taught certain things by certain traditions (like say, some Tibetan traditions), but if you were to go to his teachers and seek that type of training, you wouldn't find it (or maybe you would.... after 30 years in a Tibetan monastery). Max is special in that he not only received lots of different transmissions and training from various lineages, but is offering it out. Though, if I might add a bit of my own perspective to the mix, from a marketing perspective it sounds a lot more exciting to say, "He learned the rare practices of the Kunlun tradition" and just leave it at that, instead of saying, "yeah he learned some spontaneous qigong from someone named Sifu Jenny who teaches workshops and stuff in the U.S." Same thing with another one of Max's teachers, Andrew Lum I think, who lives in Hawaii, if I recall correctly. It's a lot more dramatic to say, "ancient and powerful practice" instead of, "he went to Hawaii and learned some meditation." I'm not saying these practices don't work, look around and you'll see that many people can vouch for them, but as I, and others have said, the marketing is done a certain way, so certain things are said, or left completely unsaid. There could also be a perfectly valid reason as well, that Max doesn't want people clamoring all over the place and harassing his teachers who may not be willing to teach others in the way they taught Max. So yeah, just my take on it.

Never mind.

Well, here's what someone told me about Max and the marketing. Max really is the real deal, but there's another guy that does a lot of the web site editing and who controls a lot of what goes out there (such as a lot of descriptions of what Kunlun is, some of Max's background). I think he used to post here, but I don't think I've seen him around, I forget what his user name was. But the thing is, I was told that he has a certain flair when it comes to marketing and describing Kunlun. Maybe it's not what people are looking for, but it's to draw in a big crowd. So maybe that involves showing certain photos, maybe that involves describing certain practices and certain teachers in a certain way, maybe that involves being vague on certain facts to increase the mystique and boost the hype... but that's just some marketing to get people in the door. What makes people stay (and as you can tell, many people do stay), is the reality of the practices. At least, that is what I am told, I'll find out when (or if?) I ever get around to it myself

Um.... if you want to get it on... use protection? Or um, you know, learn some fancy taoist sexual cultivation techniques to preserve the jing? Or, ya know, the pill, or, ya know, just not do it. Or, ya know, tell her that it's your body and you won't do anything to it you don't feel comfortable with and that should be enough for her! And here's your disclaimer saying I'm not responsible for anything that may happen to your or your relationship by saying any one (or more) of these things.....

Some cameras also have flash enabled Joking, joking, no offense meant, don't hurt me!!!!

I myself read through the several hundred posts on the Tao Bums when I was interested in Kunlun, everything I could find about the system and Max. I've heard that he has had brain scans done on him by the military that shows some pretty interesting things, but that's just what I heard from someone who made a post on the forum about what he saw Max carrying at a seminar once, so take that as you will. The funny thing about Kunlun is that I heard a lot about it, but I figured that I would wait on trying it, and instead do some other stuff, I've got a lot on my plate now, so I figured I'd finish that before moving on to the next thing. But every once in a while something pops up, either on the forum or in my own study, and I think, "that sounds like what they do in Kunlun....." So every once in a while I get this strong urge to check it out, but then I figure I should deal with what's in front of me now, and see how that works out, then move on. (I'm working through B.K. Frantzis' books, and I'm still debating whether or not to work through some of Mantak Chia's stuff, before I get to Kunlun).

I really like To Shin Do. There are a lot of people who have a problem with Hayes, and a lot of people who have a problem with just the mere whispering of "ninjutsu".... but I did karate for many years, and I decided to get the first set of DVD's in the distance learning course, and I was really amazed by what I saw. It was really practical, talking about what you do in different situations, variations on techniques, all kinds of stuff. It was totally different from the ways a lot of martial arts are taught (your typical TMA, anyway), but what surprised me even more is that the To Shin Do training actually helped me find more applications in the martial arts forms I had done in the past, and in the forms I would later come across. So if anyone else out there is thinking about To Shin Do, I recommend it!

I haven't heard about eminent domain, BUT I HAVE heard (from someone who read it in the paper the other day, which I typically don't do) that there has been a lot of Chinese buying/investing in a lot of American business that have been going down in the past couple months. It's not to the extent where the Chinese are going to be kicking people out of their homes and leaving them with two bags of rice to support themselves, but there is some shifting happening around the world.

A world without anyone else seems kind of lonely....

I think the key phrase here is "as it is offered to you" I learn on my own. I'm not saying a teacher is unnecessary, I'm saying that one can get by on one's own. If you have access to a legitimate teacher, by all means go for it! But if you're like me and have teachers like the one I described (bottom of page 3?) then you really have to go it alone (and with the help of forums like this as well ) I do not think it wise at all to spurn a teacher that is easily available. +1 to Faulkner.

I've heard something like this too. My friend is a very spiritual Hindu, and I asked him about this stuff, and he did kind of hint that there is supposed to be sort of a progression when you say it, that it rises and leads you someplace greater than where you were before. A lot of people just think "om", but it's really stuff like "aaaom". But then he followed up immediately by saying that a lot of spiritual practices were really for higher castes, and there's a lot that the highest casts did not divulge to people outside the caste, and a lot of information that WAS given out was given in such a way as to minimize the amount of real info out there. So you go around saying, "uh.... you say.... om..... yeah that's right." When the pronounced vibrations are really different. So yeah, different vibrations can affect different chakras, which has been said, and you can get those vibrations with certain syllables and things.

To be honest.... I don't really know I started out with pretty selfish and lame reasons, but those have mostly fallen away.... But I keep walking

If someone makes a post on this board.... doesn't it kind of hint that they're not an ascetic? At least not a full blown one

Well for someone in my situation, I've explored all the teachers around my area that I have access to..... frilly New Age neo hippies that talk about surfing the waves of the cosmos while listening to groovy music. Not that that's bad, I mean whatever floats your boat.... but I'm looking for someone who's serious about it. I find I get much more information coming to forums, reading books on my own, practicing, discussing, yadda yadda, then I do forking over my cash to teachers that are like, teacher: "I let my intuition guide my instruction.... do you like peanut butter and jelly? Peanut butter and jelly just popped into my head, I get the feeling the universe is trying to reveal something to me, so I can reveal it to you. Do you like peanut butter and jelly?" me: "uh.... I'm allergic to peanut butter...." teacher: "oh, well then the universe is warning you to stay away from peanuts! Beware PB&J!!" me: "so how much am I paying you?" teacher: "$100 a month for four lessons and $150 for an hour and a half personal session." me: "riiiiiiiight." Disclaimer: true story. Furthermore, I get the feeling that a lot of people mistake "studying from a book" for "studying from ONE book". That's rarely ever the case. If I find a method or a teacher who wrote a book, I do major internet searches. I research the teacher, teacher's teacher, read all about the lineage, the history, philosophy of the school, travel internet boards, find other students, talk to them, ask questions, continue practicing on my own, constantly read and re-read articles, I have bookmarked hundreds of articles for both martial arts and cultivation, saved even more on my hard drive.... A little detail here, a little detail there, piece it all together. Maybe one teacher stresses one thing, another student found some other method helped, a different variation on technique. It's never ever just pick up one book, read it once and focus on the chapters I think are cool, awkwardly practice it in front of the mirror, and then think I'm enlightened. I'm sure there are people who do it like that, and I'm sure there are people who think they are all great and that... but that's not how I do it. If you put in the right effort, when all available teachers fail, that's just how you have to do it.

Look at the yin and yang symbol.... there's a whole other half to it besides the yin aspect The thing about water is, yes, it flows around things.... but water can also create waves and smash into things (yang). How many ships have been smashed onto rocks by huge waves? Water isn't only passive, water doesn't JUST flow around things. We've seen what a huge tsunami can do to even a very huge city. A bendy tree yields to the wind, but that doesn't mean it won't fight for sunlight. Look at how plants in awkward places grow into equally awkward shapes to fight for sunlight. And as for animals, there are plenty of female animals that take control of the male. Female lions do the hunting, that's pretty yang if you ask me. I liked how you used the word flexible .... I think that's the key word here, "flexible", thanks for bringing it up, a great way to put it! Yes, be flexible enough to flow around a situation and yield to an incoming force. But if all you do is yield, that's still being inflexible, because you have closed yourself off to the ability to flow head on into something. Be flexible enough to yield. Be flexible enough to change to a straight attack if need be. The extreme of softness will create extreme hardness, just like extreme hardness will create extreme softness. Within Yin lies elements of yang (female lions doing the hunting), within Yang lies Yin (men being under total control of a woman who has successfully seduced them ). It's all there, and remember, be flexible enough to be open to anything you have to do in any situation or circumstance.

From a cultivation standpoint, killing is wrong. Taking steps back and looking at the person, looking at their life, truly understanding the why, sure, killing is wrong. But.... from the standpoint of a martial artist, from the standpoint of a person, as selfish as that might be, if someone comes and threatens my life, or perhaps more importantly endangers someone else, or endangers the lives of someone close to me, I am going to take it to them. If they are threatening to seriously injure or kill me/someone else, well, that tells me how serious they are and so dictates how serious I must be to defend myself. As nice as I'd like to be, if I just push them away or dissipate their attack in some tai chi for aikido type "be the nice guy philosophy", who's to say they won't immediately come back, with a weapon, with friends, etc. As much as I'd like to be the enlightened Bodhisattva and have endless compassion for all beings and not kill someone else, if someone is threatening my life or the lives of others, I am going to take any chance I have and give it to them. You can argue "right" and "wrong" all you want.... sure, perhaps on the level of pure spiritual cultivation.... you shouldn't do it. But you can say you have a reason for killing, if you did. That's pretty much one of the few situations in which I'd say killing is justified.... not necessarily "right", but at least justified. But here's another question: let's say someone is threatening to kill someone you love, then says they will kill you afterward, you have a chance to stop the future murderer. You can be all cultivation like and be like, "I shall not kill you." You'd have that first victim hear you say that, then they'd die. You'd watch them die, and know you couldn't do anything. Then you'd be dead yourself, so it's not like you'd be able to repent or anything like that.... I'm not trying to be a jerk, or offer some morally paradoxical never-gonna-happen scenario to test the limits of your claim that you wouldn't kill..... that's just how I see it. That's one of the questions I asked myself, and my answer was, yes, I'd kill the person threatening me and that other person. Well, first I'd try seriously maiming/crippling them, so they'd technically be alive.... but for the purposes of the scenario, yes, I'd kill. Again, the purely Bodhisattva supreme cultivated master guru or whatever may not kill in any circumstance.... But you would be the indirect cause of the death of another person.... are you willing to accept that? I am willing to defend myself and others if I need to, and that's that.

Wasn't really a book.... but a youtube channel. Yogameditation's youtube channel, actually (the guy's name is Wan Qi aka Bob Kim aka something else I forgot). Sure, he does some kinda sketchy things, and says a lot of things I don't agree with, HOWEVER, it was because of his videos that my interest got piqued in spiritual matters and serious cultivation.

Yup, kinda like me. I did karate (it was mostly shotokan but the teacher had thrown in some TKD stuff in there too, also incorporated some Judo and aikido) for several years.... but the way it was taught was really crappy, so I wound up learning pretty much nothing about fighting and nothing about internal stuff. Then I explored some schools, mostly Wing Chun and a general self defense school. Those were both good, but either expensive, too far away, or had a wacko teacher...... So with no other options, I got Stephen K. Hayes' To Shin Do DVD's.... and thought they were awesome Really addressed stuff that you'd actually see. I have the first two, I experiment with the techniques with my brother, and also get the chance to test some stuff out with some friends, one who does BJJ and one who does Aikido and boxing (interesting combination, I know). I also got some tai chi books on Yang style long form, started going through that (meticulously, constantly reading then re-reading the instructions on alignments, body feeling, then watching videos of the masters doing it). People say you can't learn from books/DVD's, but it's worked out pretty well for me so far.... you have to be honest with yourself, I guess, and not fool yourself into thinking you get something when you don't.

One could say that everything has a cost, but that cost isn't always money (like you said, it could be time spent finding which way is NOT the correct way) so everything always has, and always will be, a commodity in some form or another I'm paying sticker price for a university that was supposed to be top of the line, I was offered full rides from a number of other colleges but turned them down because I figured "you get what you pay for." Every day I am constantly gagging at the sheer ignorance of the vast majority of the students on this campus. Too many dollars, not enough sense. Common sense aint so common. Forget the box, most of these people can't think their way out of a paper bag. Then you hear the professors and other faculty give lectures about how, "you are going to be the leaders of the next generation!" and I think, "we might as well just nuke ourselves now." It makes me SICK. And I think.... wow.... if I wanted to spend four years going to a school full of idiots, I could have done it for free......... And yes, I DO criticize Harvard and Yale. Don't know if you watched the most recent presidential inauguration, but there was some poet who was from Yale, I think, giving a poem..... some of the emo kids in my high school wrote just as well as her, oh, but that's right, she comes from a big name institution..... riiiiiiight Right now I'm mostly leaning to the "mediocre system selling good ideas and practices that can be found elsewhere." I'm sure if you do enough searching, reading, and training, you can find the vast majority of what most of these programs claim to teach, but at a much cheaper price.... given your location. Thinking on it now, given the location of the school, it might actually be a good deal, compared to all the other schools around there.

I think that B.K. Frantzis' "Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body" is pretty good, though I'm just working through it right now and not that far... Thanks for these links!

There was a thread around here for a bit about qi circulation, qi gong, and all that other stuff, being useless. That when you sit in silent, emptiness meditation, those things happen in your body naturally. The problem is that subsequent generations focused on reproducing the effects within the body by focusing on those effects, instead of the emptiness meditation and stuff. Which is quite an interesting way of looking at it! Certainly qigong helps the body, as has been mentioned before, as a preventative measure. For fighting, being able to lengthen the amount of time someone can stay active, to be able to each anyone no matter of age, that must have been very important, especially in places like the Chen village where all you had was the family martial art to defend the village against attacks. So to be able to keep your fighting force well into old age, that must have sounded pretty good! Then, I guess as a purely spiritual path.... it's just one of the ways you can go about it. In my opinion, you can go through silent meditation, have the stuff happen in the body, but not really pay attention to it, and just be that way. Or you can cultivate qi within the body, do stuff, and eventually work up to more intense emptiness meditation. I guess the end point is the same, it's just how you get there. But that's just my person opinion on the matter.

Yup, pretty much. Interesting about the movie bit. The world has enough problems as it is, but I think that humans tend to create a lot more problems on their own somehow. Some movies can reflect that. Then again, maybe everyone just got paranoid. Sometimes after intense exercise my muscles can start to shake, or quiver, if I just got out of watching a movie about demons, I might think I was possessed