‘Internal Training’ by Richard Dunn
November 21st, 2007Referring to the you tube video clips put up here (energetics list dl) by me a while back.
These clips were made about 4 years ago on the request of members of the TCClist after the work being demonstrated was described and discussed and people asked to see clips and examples. Even though they had been discussed most people still took them out of context.
What they are not!!!
They are not fighting techniques, apart from very superficially which I will try to explain later.
They are not magic, or any form of supernatural behaviour, they are quite normal when you understand even if not accepting the purpose.
They are not Master worship or forms of ultra co-operative submission.
It is not what most people interpret as Lin Kong Jin or some form of comic book energy ray.
All of these I have seen put up in the arguments that have been associated with these clips.
The reality is very much more boring.
What they are:-
They are training techniques.
What is being trained are energetic Jins.
Back to the basics of it which I hope a lot will at least accept if they are from the internal side of the arts. The person is made up of
3 distinct elements, body-mind-spirit(energy). Normal behaviour is that all three are used in unison in all human behaviour. But the percentage of use varies considerably if specific behaviour is looked at.
For example reading a book. Little physical work mostly just turning the page and operating the eyeballs, little spiritual work apart from the energetic activation of an emotional reaction, the work is almost entirely mental. Do we question that work?
Another example digging a hole. Very little intellectual or mental involvement apart from getting the hole in the right place size and depth, very little spiritual / energetic involvement, the process is almost entirely physical. Do we question that work?
There are similarly almost entirely spiritual / energetic activities which in the west are largely limited to religious activities such as prayer, but song and music (listening and making) are largely spiritual / energetic activities as well. Do we question that work?
In the martial arts we train the body, can anyone argue with the benefits of this? We also train the mind, some people do argue about the benefits of this. But we can also train our energetic being, most people argue about this! Below is a brief blurb as to what I mean by this :-
You have a physical being, the one that you see in the mirror everyday, it is a biological organic machine that can break down and will wear out, being organic it is also subject to other biological machines hijacking it for their own purposes (fungi, bacteria and viruses).
You are also a reasoning and calculating being, this is the person doing the observing of you in the mirror. It is a biological organic computer that as with the modern electronic version can be subject to overload, information loss, or when the program gets corrupted, crashing.
Within these two physical personas is the energetic persona that makes it all work, and also provides the emotional aspects to your life. From the spark of life given to you at conception this energy is the means by which everything works your energetic being. In Chinese it is referred to as Chi (Qi), in Japanese Ki and in India Prana. The old pre-christian Anglo Saxon name was Megin (corrupted to the modern word magic). The Norse word was Galdra. It can manifest itself in many different ways that western science is only just beginning to understand.
Each organ and bodily function has its own energy dedicated to its correct function, dictated by your genetic programming and controlled by your unconscious mind. This energy causes the growth, sustaining, and ultimately the decline of our physical and mental being. The purist form of this energy is given to us at conception and is referred to in some cultures as soul or spirit, it is the last energy to leave the machine when the lights finally go out. All the other energy we use and retain throughout our lives comes from the food we consume and the air that we breath, and the quality of this fuel is important for the quality of the resulting energy.
As human beings we fight shy of physical interfaces, we like to keep thing at arms length and at a mental interface. Things have to get very imbalanced to create a strong physical interface. As with all things that imbalance can be yin or yang in nature, in this case making love or making war (fighting). They are in reality just opposite sides of the same coin and are both intrinsically imbalanced in nature.
So there has to be strong motivation or intent for physical contact, so the interface in my terms is highly energetic, lots of readable noise. So we end up with a classic trilogy, physical contact and interaction, metal contact and interaction and energetic contact and interaction (the only visible or consciously perceivable aspect of this latter one is emotional).
The concept of the external martial arts is creation, make what you create stronger, faster or more intense than your interface partner / opponent and you create your ascendancy by overpowering. A dominant / subordinate relationship.
The concept of the internal arts and specifically tai-chi is *non
action* or pursuit of the Tao. You do not contribute to the interface, apart from to balance any misbalance. So it could be said that tai-chi is not a martial art (shock horror) it is more an un- martial art. If you do tai-chi there should never be any physical confrontation. But if it should happen then you switch from balancing to re-enforcement, it is then a process of USE, and the more there is to use the easier the situation is to deal with. So we have three realities that are available to use :- physical - re-enforce what your opponent is doing in order to destabilise and use, mental - ditto, energetic - ditto. As a Tai-Chi-er physically and mentally we easily understand the problem and the need for no confrontation hence the need for soft contact. We understand the need for intent (yi) to control and direct our actions. The problem is our energetic awareness is at a far more primitive level, basically at genetic programming or instinct level, so we have lost our awareness of it as our intellect and frontal lobe gets in the way of exploiting or understanding this, which is why most animal of comparable size and weight or even far less are fully capable of knocking 10 bells out of us. They read us naturally and easily, that is why *listening* is the key. You can listen with your skin as well as your ears as a wave is a vibration which doesn’t have to just be airborne noise it can be structurally borne vibration and finally it can be like a radio wave across space, you just have to be tuned in and capable of hearing.
That is what energetic training is, the process of making you capable of hearing and giving you that conscious awareness. Once you can listen you can also talk and that is largely a process of control. If you stop a fist and apply energetic control it becomes frozen in time and space, for how long is only dictated by shock, realisation and recovery,. But a split second is long enough to kill!! Energetic control is taking away their will or intent and applying your own, looked at in scientific terms and technically - out of phase cancels - in phase re-enforces. So you can also use the wave to do work and re- enforce the physical, a classic example is fajin. BUT it is not Chen fajin which is largely physical in nature, Yang fajin is energetic in nature, it is using the strike to transmit a wave front that has a diminishing size and increasing frequency until at the point of contact it explodes, in energetic terms, literally. This is what pulverises and damages internally as that wave front can also be aimed by your intent beyond the point of contact.
So there are parts of this training work that are martial in nature such as the fajin training. BUT the work you are looking at in those clips is sensitivity training, firstly to discover the feel of your energy, secondly discover how it can link into another human and be controlled by them, thirdly how to override that control and reply.
This work is never used in isolation it is only trained in isolation, it is used in conjunction as an extra skill or if necessary weapon. A simple example is that on contact if you are in control of your energy enough to create the link you can destabilise your opponent by lifting their root with your intent. This makes it far easier to throw / push them.
These skills are far from unique and are much used, they are just not much talked about, mainly due to the negative reaction mostly seen when these things are discussed by the inexperienced and ignorant.
There are also charlatans and performers. I state, we within our group are not, but it is your choice if you accept that. We run open classes and have never turned away a constructive even if sceptical student. Disruptive students are not accepted
There are groups that train this work stateside and probably all over the world, those people are whom I want to be primarily attract to this group, but anyone with an open minded interest is welcome.
Probably the most well known is Chu Gin Soon and his son Vincent based in Boston.
Anyway have fun, I and others are here to respond to anything sensible.
Richard (posted by dl)