I received in my email box this week a message from some Shaolin based Martial Art system telling about some amazing video clips that I should see. The video clips were about a US based 'Martial Artist' who had just given a workshop in the UK.
So, tentatively, I spent some money to wait for these clips to download. They show a person standing there in a rather vulnerable position with another person standing some feet away pointing his hand at him. A couple of minutes and the person being pointed at begins to sway and then moves forward! Most of the video clips were of this type taking a couple of minutes for the so-called empty force] to work. However there was another clip of a so-called knife attack. I say 'so-called' because no self-respecting knifer would ever attack in that manner by running at the attackee with an outstretched knife form a distance of about 15 feet away! The attacker gets to where the empty force person is, the empty force person moves his body to the side thus avoiding the 'attack' and the knifer falls to the ground. The caption reads, "A Knife Attacker is thrown to the ground with out touching him."
Well, I was disappointed, as I have seen much better circus tricks and more professionally done. Only a few attending the demonstration were actually fooled by these demonstrations with most being very sceptical.
If you cannot make a living by teaching people simply how to defend themselves, then don't! Why do people have to have some super-natural powers in order to make a living from martial arts? The martial arts are very special and magical as they are without all of the circus tricks.
I showed some of the clips to a friend of mine who is head of physiology at Sydney University. He came back with the answer that each time, the body language and muscles being used of the person being pulled forward or pushed backward or downward, indicated that he was using his own muscles either consciously or sub-consciously to make this happen. At one time, one of the clips claimed that the student was being lifted up by the throat by the empty force. However, when viewed, you actually see his head moving downward not up!
Most people who attend workshops and seminars go there because they want to believe! And people always 'see what they want to see'. There is so much emotional stuff happening in someone's body when another person tells them that something weird will happen to them when he waves his hand etc., that as soon as they do feel something, anything, they deem it to be because of what the other person is doing to them!
There is another thing that just didn't ring true about this particular demonstration. In every clip, the 'doer' took around one to two minutes to have any empty force cause the student to move. However in the so-called knife attack, it was instant! So one would think that if someone could instantly use empty force on an attacker, that he would do it all the time.
In every instance, the person having empty force done on them, stands in the most vulnerable position possible so that of course after a minute or so in that position, there will be some body movement. In order not to make the visiting dignitary look stupid, the person having this done to him has to do something, so he uses this opportunity to add to his body momentum and literally either causes himself to fall forward or backward.
The Sceptical Society in the USA and indeed worldwide have a standing invitation to anyone who is able to demonstrate under scientific conditions anything super-natural. They will give $100,000 to anyone who can do this. Now, being able to move someone or throw them away or cause them to miss when they knife you would be classified as being super-natural! So why has no-one ever claimed their prize! And I also have a standing agreement for $US1000.00 (which is all I can legally afford) that will be given to anyone who is able to move me so much as one inch without touching me using so-called empty force. This has to of course be done under scientific conditions so that the person doing it cannot claim the prize because my body moved to or fro as one's body does standing in such a position for a long period. The person must stand there and allow me to attack him with a knife and must not touch me in any way! I will gladly give this money to anyone who is able to demonstrate to me such ability on me! However, all that have tried so far have not even been able to move me one inch, they have often moved me to tears though!! And thank goodness I have such students who are also sceptical and who never play the game as no-one has ever been able to move one of my students without touching them.
And even if such a person existed who could move someone in some way, what kind of a martial art asks someone to stand there for one minute while the empty force works!
I have seen these things over and over again. I guess there are many millions of gullible people in the world who want to believe in something supernatural in the martial arts. And this comes about by people not wishing to put in the hard work necessary to simply become good at a martial system! Many people seem somewhat supernatural in their self-defence. But it is simply that they have worked for thirty or forty years training hard at the one martial art in order to get to where they are. Newcomers want to get it all in a couple of years, so when someone comes along who tells them that they can also move people without touching them, almost instantly without hard training, they jump at it, handing over their hard earned money.
You cannot use Qi power to move someone from a distance! Humans were not made that way. And in most cases the so-called 'master' is overweight, obviously unhealthy and has so much upper body tension that even if they could do such things, the Qi would be blocked in the upper body! An unhealthy person cannot use Qi to move people. If you cannot use your own Qi to make you healthy, then what hope do you have of using any excess Qi to move people without touching them? And it must take a lot of Qi do to that! So if your own Qi is too busy trying to fix your own body, then what hope do you have?
Qi can be used to heal others and yourself and you can affect the way someone's body works by affecting the various electro-magnetic flows in the body to drain Qi etc. But you must be very close to the person and you must touch their Magnetic flows. In order to do this you must wipe your hands as close to without actually touching the body. So in order to do this of course you must first of all be able to fight to defend yourself!
On national TV, I have burnt cotton wool at ten paces using my 'Qi', I have had a sharp sword thrust into my neck and it bent causing no harm, I have broken river stones with one finger and walked on eggs! I can kick one of my students in the groin with a very hard groin kick and cause no damage and I have rubbed a piece of wood causing it to burn after one minute and I have put out candles using my 'Qi'. I have had people punching and using knife edge strikes to my neck and I have done the old chop-stick in the neck trick. I have had a Tae Kwon-do expert kick me full force into the solar plexus! However, at the end of it I always explain how the trick is done! Some require some training however, and also some expertise but in the end they are all tricks of physics, some are just circus tricks. Very convincing tricks where even the cameraman did not believe me when I explained that the sword in the neck was only a trick. So I told him that I could also teach him how to do it in 30 seconds. He held his breath but trusted me to do it, and voila, the sword was bending like a fishing rod when I thrust it into his neck, not a mark! After one such demonstration and before I could explain that they were all tricks, one person in the audience asked that I do the sword in the neck up against a wall without anyone holding the other end of the sword and simply thrust my own body forward onto it! So I did this with the same effect, the sword bending like a fishing rod! This last one takes some training and conditioning though and I would not advise anyone to try it! All tricks!
Healing someone form a distance is however, a completely different story! I have done some wonderful healings on people by simply being there! Or by having someone simply phone me. Nothing special though, it's all in the training and everyone has natural healing abilities. But God did not make us so weak that we could be pushed over from a distance! Nor can you ever use Qi for ego in demonstration. And after-all, that's all it comes down to when people do these tricks in public, just to show how good they are or that they have some kind of super-natural power over other people that mere mortals do not have! Any people who would have these powers, would not be known! They would not need to let it be known as they would be above ego! And if you ever asked one of these people about it, he/she would tell you exactly what I am telling you now so that you would not waste most of your life trying for something that was unattainable! Like the story of Buddha when he came across a yogi sitting by the river. He asked where he could get a boat to go across. The yogi pointed to a boat and then said that he had spent 60 years of his life meditating and now he was able to walk on water! Buddha simply said that it might have been better to use the boat and not waste one's life when you could be doing more for people rather than a very selfish pastime!
To know if a teacher is true, firstly look at his eyes. Are they sparkling, healthy. Then look at his body, how he holds the body. Is his upper body tense, over-bulked? Is he overweight and obviously out of condition? Is he calm and friendly, confident but not overly? Look at the way he is balanced or not. Is he bottom heavy (this is good)? Does he have fa-jing (explosive energy) in his punches or other attacks? Can he knock your arm off while punching a hand held mitt from only one inch away or even while touching the mitt with his fingertips? How is his ego?
These circus tricks are getting people away from the real meaning of the Martial Arts. We do martial arts firstly to get ourselves healthy, then to be able to defend ourselves and family and lastly to be able to heal others of illness in mind and body. This takes lots of hard work. But along the way you gain so much from learning a real internal martial art rather than circus tricks! The quickest way to get circus tricks is to purchase them from a shop in Taiwan that specializes in such things.
