the biggest problem in the world
Topic: intelligent living

I think I can state what the biggest problem in the world is, the one problem that if solved would either eliminate or greatly reduce all the other problems facing humanity. That problem is that the average level of consciousness of the inhabitants of this planet is exceptionally low. To further clarify, the average level of emotional , intellectual, and psychological maturity of the average human being is unacceptably low. This one issue affects every other issue facing humanity right now. As individuals we are ego centric as groups we are ethnocentric and xenophobic. We allow the mass media to affect our opinions without verifying the facts and thinking for ourselves in a way that is rational logical and unbiased. Spiritually we have clung to archaic interpretations of archaic religions and thus act in an archaic fashion. We as human beings must realize there is only one race, that race being human. We must seek our own emotional and psychological growth in a way that is honest, sincere, and practical. We must find the universal truths central to all religions and incorporate them into a spiritual discipline that leads to an ability to function at a high level of consciousness. Until this is done , history will repeat itself over and over again, and as technology grows by leaps and bounds we will find new ways to express how infantile and destructive we can be as a species.

-B.

Sitai Helen Moy?s birthday
Topic: Moy Yat Ving Tsun Event
This year, Sitai Helen Moy’s birthday will be celebrated in Philadelphia with a three-day event from November 28th through the 30th. This honor will be hosted by the Moy Bah Hugh clan.  The celebration will begin with a reception Friday evening.  Saturday morning and afternoon will be kung fu time in the Philadelphia Chinatown Mokwoon followed by the main celebratory dinner Saturday evening.  The weekend will conclude with a brunch Sunday morning.

Please email miavelez@hotmail.com  by 8/31/2008 with an estimate of

1)      Who will be attending the main events on Saturday and

2)      Who will require overnight accommodations 

For any other questions or concerns, you may email me at myvtmi@gmail.com or call 215-238-9066

Zen Training
Topic: intelligent living

Daily Zen -- Ordinary Mind

by Katsuki Sekida

Zen is not, in my view, philosophy or mysticism.
It is simply a practice of readjustment of
nervous activity. That is, it restores the distorted
nervous system to its normal functioning.

In ordinary daily life our consciousness works ceaselessly to protect and maintain our interests. It has acquired the habit of "utilitarian thinking" - looking upon the things in the world as so many tools, looking at objects in the light of how they can be made use of. We call this attitude the habitual way of consciousness. This way of looking at things is the origin of our distorted view of the world.

We come to see ourselves, too, as objects to be made use of, and we fail to see into our own true nature. This way of treating oneself and the world leads to a mechanical way of thinking, which is the cause of so much of our suffering. Zen aims at overthrowing this distorted view of the world.

If you go climbing in the mountains, you were probably led to do so in the first place by the beauty of the mountains. When you start to climb, however, you find it is a matter of working one's way along patiently, step by step, progressing with great care and caution. Some knowledge of climbing technique is essential.

It is the same with Zen. We take it up in the search of the meaning of life, or in the hope of solving the problems of our existence, but once we actually start, we find we have to look down at our feet, and we are faced with practice followed by more practice. Beginners in Zen will usually be told to start by practicing counting their breaths - that is, to count each exhalation up to ten, and then start again.

Try this for yourself. You may think you can do it without difficulty, but when you start you will soon find that wandering thoughts come into your head, perhaps when you have reached about "five" or "six," and the thread of counting is broken. The next moment you come to yourself and can't remember where you left off. You have to start again, saying "one" and so on.

How can we prevent our thoughts from wandering? How can we learn to focus our attention on one thing? The answer is that we cannot do it with our brain alone; the brain cannot control its thoughts by itself. The power to control the activity of our mind comes from the body, and it depends critically on posture and breathing.

With regard to posture, we need only say at this stage that stillness of body engenders stillness of mind. Immobility is a first essential. Traditionally, and for good reasons, we sit down to practice, because (among other reasons) it is in this position that we can keep our body still but our minds wakeful.

Immobility results in a diminution of the stimuli reaching the brain, until eventually there are almost none. This gives rise, in due course, to a condition in which you cease to be aware of the position of your body. It is not a state of numbness, for you can move your limbs and body if you want. But if you keep your body still, it is not felt.

We call this condition "off-sensation." In this state, the activity of the cortex of the brain becomes steadily less and less. We continue to breathe, of course, as we sit, and find that our ability to concentrate our attention, to remain wakeful, and ultimately to enter samadhi depends on our method of breathing.

Even those who have not practiced zazen (sitting Zen) know that it is possible to control the mind by manipulating the breathing. Quiet breathing brings about a quiet state of mind.

In zazen, we breathe almost entirely by means of our abdominal muscles and diaphragm. If the lower abdomen is allowed to fill out, the diaphragm is lowered, the thoracic cavity (between the neck and abdomen) is enlarged, and air is taken into the lungs. When the abdominal muscles contract, the diaphragm is pushed up, expelling air from the lungs.

The slow, sustained exhalation that we adopt in zazen is produced by keeping the diaphragm contracted so that it opposes the action of the abdominal muscles which are trying to push air out of the lungs. This opposition generates a state of tension in the abdominal muscles, and the maintenance of this state of tension is of utmost importance in the practice of zazen.

All other parts of the body are motionless, and their muscles are either relaxed or in a state of constant, moderate tension. Only the abdominal muscles are active. This activity is a vital part of the mechanism by which concentration and wakefulness of the brain are maintained.

Traditionally, in the East, the lower part of the abdomen (called the tanden) has been regarded as the seat of human spiritual power. Correct zazen ensures that the weight of the body is concentrated there, producing a strong tension.

The essential point we want to make is that it is the correct manipulation of the lower abdomen, as we sit and breathe, that enables us to control the activity of our mind. Posture and breathing are a key to concentration, to stilling the activity of the mind, and to entering samadhi.

When we put it so briefly, our conclusions may seem far-fetched. If they do not seem convincing on the page, the reader should experiment for him-or herself along the lines we indicate. Zen is above all a matter of personal experience. Students are asked to accept nothing as the truth that they cannot demonstrate for themselves, with their own mind and body.

In the state of "off-sensation," we lose the sense of the whereabouts of our body. Subsequently, by stilling the activity of the mind, a state is reached in which time, space, and causation, which constitute the framework of consciousness, drop away. We call this condition "body and mind fallen off."

In ordinary mental activity the cerebral cortex takes the major role, but in this state, it is hardly active at all. "Body and mind fallen off" may seem to be nothing but a condition of mere being, but this mere being is accompanied by a remarkable mental power, which we may characterize as a condition of extreme wakefulness.

To those who have not experienced it, this description may seem strange, yet the condition really does occur in samadhi. At the time, however, we are not aware of it, because there is no reflecting activity of consciousness, and so it is hard to describe. If we try to describe it, however, it would be as an extraordinary mental stillness. In this stillness, or emptiness, the source of all kinds of activity is latent. It is this state that we call pure existence.

If you catch hold of this state of pure existence, and then come back into the actual world of conscious activity, you will find that Being itself appears transformed. This is why Being is said to be "veiled in darkness" to the eyes of those who have not experienced pure existence. When mature in the practice of zazen, Being is seen with one's own eyes.

However, just as energy can be used for many different purposes, so can pure existence be experienced in relation to any phase of life - anger, hatred, or jealousy as well as love and beauty. Every human action must be carried on through the ego, which plays a role comparable to that of a pipe or channel through which energy is conducted for different uses. We usually think of the ego as a kind of constant, unchanging entity. In fact, however, it is simply a succession of physical and mental events or pressures that appear momentarily and as quickly pass away.

So long as our mind operates subjectively, however, there must be a subject that functions as the ego. As there is normally no cessation of subjective activity, there can normally be no state in which we are devoid of an ego. However, the nature of this ego can change. Every time we succeed in banishing a mean or restricted ego - a petty ego - another ego with a broader outlook appears in its place, and eventually what we may call an "egoless ego" makes its appearance.

When you have acquired an egoless ego, there is no hatred, no jealousy, no fear; you experience a state in which you see everything in its true aspect. In this state you cling to or adhere to nothing. It is not that you are without desires, but that while desiring and adhering to things you are at the same time unattached to them.

The Diamond Sutra says, 'Abiding nowhere, let the mind work.' This means: Do not let your mind be bound by your desire, and let your desire occur in your mind. True freedom is freedom from your own desires.

When you have once experienced pure existence, you undergo a complete about-face in your view of the world. But unfortunately, as long as we are human beings, we cannot escape from the inevitability of living as individuals. We cannot leave the world of differentiation. And so we are placed in a new dilemma, one that we did not encounter before. Inevitably, this involves a certain internal conflict, and may cause much distress. To deal with this, further training of the mind has to be undertaken to learn how, while living in the world of differentiation, we can avoid discrimination.

We have to learn how to exercise the mind of nonattachment while working in attachment. This is called training after the attainment of realization, which constitutes an essential part of Zen.

There is a Zen saying, "Differentiation without equality is bad differentiation; equality without differentiation is bad equality." This is a common saying, but the level of understanding it refers to is not common, since it can be attained only in a mature state of Zen practice.

ZEN TRAINING IS ENDLESS

The mean or petty ego, which was thought to have been disposed of, is found once again to be secretly creeping back into one's mind. Long, chronic habits of consciousness are so firmly implanted in our minds that they haunt us perpetually, and it is impossible for us to inhibit them before they appear.

The longer we train ourselves, however, the more we are liberated from the petty ego. When the petty ego appears, do not be concerned with it. Simply ignore it. When a negative thought strikes you, acknowledge it, then drop it. The Zen saying goes, "The occurrence of an evil thought is an affliction; not to continue it is the remedy."

Zen talks about "emptiness." What is meant by this? When a thought appears in your mind, it is necessarily accompanied by internal pressure. Emptiness is a condition in which internal mental pressure is totally dissolved.

Even when you think, "It's fine today," a certain internal pressure is generated in your mind, and you feel you want to speak to someone else and say, "It's fine today, isn't it?" By doing this, you discharge the pressure.

We think every moment, and an internal pressure is generated, and we lose equilibrium. In Zen we train ourselves to recover equilibrium every moment. The ego is built up from a succession of internal pressures. When the pressures are dissolved, the ego vanishes, and there is true emptiness.

A student of Christianity, hearing that Zen talks of emptiness, offered for comparison a definition of holiness. Holiness, he said, means completeness, with nothing added to it.

The word holiness is found in Buddhism, too. A Buddha is holy. But in Buddhism, when you become a Buddha, you are supposed to forget you are a Buddha. When you are conscious of being a Buddha, you are not truly a Buddha, because you are ensnared by the idea. You are not empty. Every time that you think you are achieving something - becoming a Buddha, attaining holiness, even emptiness - you must cast it away.

In a famous zen episode, Joshu asked his teacher Nansen, "What is the way?" "Ordinary mind is the way," was Nansen's answer.

But how can we attain this ordinary mind? We could say, empty your mind, and there is ordinary mind. But this is to resort to exhortation, or to a merely verbal explanation of what Zen aims at. Students of Zen must realize it for themselves.

This article was excerpted from A Guide to Zen, ©2003, by Katsuki Sekida.

Christ the Magician?
Topic: History

Some speculate that Jesus Christ may have been a hermeticist

or an initiate/graduate of some from of egyptian mystery school. it's something to think about-B.

Earliest reference describes Christ as 'magician'
Bowl dated between late 2nd century B.C. and the early 1st century A.D.
By Jennifer Viegas
Discovery Channel
updated 10:23 a.m. ET, Wed., Oct. 1, 2008
A team of scientists led by renowned French marine archaeologist Franck Goddio recently announced that they have found a bowl, dating to between the late 2nd century B.C. and the early 1st century A.D., that is engraved with what they believe could be the world's first known reference to Christ.

If the word "Christ" refers to the Biblical Jesus Christ, as is speculated, then the discovery may provide evidence that Christianity and paganism at times intertwined in the ancient world.

The full engraving on the bowl reads, "DIA CHRSTOU O GOISTAIS," which has been interpreted by the excavation team to mean either, "by Christ the magician" or, "the magician by Christ."

"It could very well be a reference to Jesus Christ, in that he was once the primary exponent of white magic," Goddio, co-founder of the Oxford Center of Maritime Archaeology, said.

He and his colleagues found the object during an excavation of the underwater ruins of Alexandria's ancient great harbor. The Egyptian site also includes the now submerged island of Antirhodos, where Cleopatra's palace may have been located.

Both Goddio and Egyptologist David Fabre, a member of the European Institute of Submarine Archaeology, think a "magus" could have practiced fortune telling rituals using the bowl. The Book of Matthew refers to "wisemen," or Magi, believed to have been prevalent in the ancient world.

According to Fabre, the bowl is also very similar to one depicted in two early Egyptian earthenware statuettes that are thought to show a soothsaying ritual.

"It has been known in Mesopotamia probably since the 3rd millennium B.C.," Fabre said. "The soothsayer interprets the forms taken by the oil poured into a cup of water in an interpretation guided by manuals."

He added that the individual, or "medium," then goes into a hallucinatory trance when studying the oil in the cup.

"They therefore see the divinities, or supernatural beings appear that they call to answer their questions with regard to the future," he said.

The magus might then have used the engraving on the bowl to legitimize his supernatural powers by invoking the name of Christ, the scientists theorize.

Goddio said, "It is very probable that in Alexandria they were aware of the existence of Jesus" and of his associated legendary miracles, such as transforming water into wine, multiplying loaves of bread, conducting miraculous health cures, and the story of the resurrection itself.

While not discounting the Jesus Christ interpretation, other researchers have offered different possible interpretations for the engraving, which was made on the thin-walled ceramic bowl after it was fired, since slip was removed during the process.

Bert Smith, a professor of classical archaeology and art at Oxford University, suggests the engraving might be a dedication, or present, made by a certain "Chrestos" belonging to a possible religious association called Ogoistais.

Klaus Hallof, director of the Institute of Greek inscriptions at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, added that if Smith's interpretation proves valid, the word "Ogoistais" could then be connected to known religious groups that worshipped early Greek and Egyptian gods and goddesses, such as Hermes, Athena and Isis.

Hallof additionally pointed out that historians working at around, or just after, the time of the bowl, such as Strabon and Pausanias, refer to the god "Osogo" or "Ogoa," so a variation of this might be what's on the bowl. It is even possible that the bowl refers to both Jesus Christ and Osogo.

Fabre concluded, "It should be remembered that in Alexandria, paganism, Judaism and Christianity never evolved in isolation. All of these forms of religion (evolved) magical practices that seduced both the humble members of the population and the most well-off classes."


"It was in Alexandria where new religious constructions were made to propose solutions to the problem of man, of God's world," he added. "Cults of Isis, mysteries of Mithra, and early Christianity bear witness to this."

The bowl is currently on public display in the exhibit "Egypt's Sunken Treasures" at the Matadero Cultural Center in Madrid, Spain, until November 15.

© 2008 Discovery Channel

Unarmed Combat
Topic: Close Quarter Combat

Scientific Fighting Congress - Force Necessary Unarmed Combatives - Private instruction

A practical approach to self defense combining the best techniques and tactics of both eastern and western fighting methods.

This course consist of 10 levels, each level is taught in ten one hour sessions, cost of instruction is $25.00 per hour.($250.00 per level)

These consist of strikes, kicks, cranks, invading entries, takedowns, throws in standing, kneeling and ground combat scenarios, with and against empty hands, or modern weapons like sticks, knives and guns. All supported by skill developing drills. This is perhaps like a college course of fighting. The first three levels are designed to be the basic self defense crash course. You can train simply for knowledge or for certification. For more info respond to this post or goto http://www.vtkfsystem.com/id14.html

something to think about
Topic: intelligent living

Human beings prefabricate culture, morality, religious creeds, laws, and police systems to stop those who go against the common interests for that moment in history. They plan and program community life and the future of their children. Internally, however, the spiritual spark grows ever weaker in the face of the progressive dehumanization of a world which in truth was never human to begin with, but only animal intelligent. The world has glorified science and forgotten human nature.

The center of gravity of a person's psychological awareness is projected more and more toward the external world, progressively abandoning itself to incarnate in the monstrous sons of civilization: consumer products, machines, cinema, and television. Advertising and the press are the two super monsters of our times, tools by which man is skillfully manipulated and converted into a perfect automaton.

He becomes an obedient consumer of certain products, a respectful server of ideologies and systems, which in turn provide small groups with power. If it is true that we live in the era of multitudes, and that their voices have taken over for the authority of kings and princes of the past, it is no less true that history is the conflict of minorities, that is to say, of the leaders who direct the masses.

On this point the words of Professor Ludwig Von Bertalanffy of the University of Alberta are interesting:

Behavior is a response to stimuli coming from the outside ... So far as it is not innate or instinctive, behavior is shaped by outside influences that have met the organism in the past: classical conditioning after Pavlov, instrumental conditioning after Skinner, early childhood experience after Freud, secondary reinforcements after more recent theories.

Hence training, education, and human life in general are essentially responses to outside conditions: beginning in early childhood with toilet training and other manipulations whereby socially acceptable behavior is gratified and undesirable behavior blocked; continuing with education, which is best carried through according to Skinnerian principles of reinforcement of correct responses and by means of teaching machines and ending in adult man in an affluent society which makes everybody happy, conditioning him, in a strictly scientific manner, by the mass media to be a perfect consumer-that is, an automaton properly answering in the ways prescribed by the industrial-military-political establishment.

. . . Man as a machine that can be programmed; all those machines identical to automobiles coming off the assembly line; equilibrium or comfort as the ultimate value; behavior as a business transaction with minimum expense and maximum gain-this is a perfect expression of the philosophy of commercial society. Stimulus-response, input-output, producer-consumer are all the same concepts, only expressed in different terms.

Professor Bertalanffy continues:

I don't care a jot whether and to what extent professors A, B, or C have modified Watson, Hull, and Freud, and have replaced their blunt statements by more qualified and sophisticated circumlocutions. I do care a lot that the spirit still is all-pervading in our society and, even more, seems necessary to keep it going: reducing man to the lower levels of his animal nature, manipulating him into becoming a feebleminded and consumeristic automaton, or a marionette of political power, systematically dulling his brain through a perverse system of education; in short, dehumanizing him ever further by means of a sophisticated psychological technology.

The effects of this manipulation we see everywhere: in the unspeakable vulgarity of popular culture; in the unbearable children and teenagers who do not know their mother tongue when entering college but are glued to the television screen for five hours a day and find no better outlet than drug addiction, premature pregnancies, or delinquency; in a drab society ... in which, through its meaningless rat race, fills thousands of mental hospitals; in politics which has converted Jeffersonian democracy into a manipulated herd of cattle.

. . . Mass persuasion is, of course, one of the oldest human arts, from the sophists of Athens, the rhetoric of Aristotle, and the medieval trivium to Hitler's famous manual. But, so long as it was art, its effects remained capricious and unpredictable, as well as limited in space and time. Rebellion was possible even against the most powerful dictator; as a matter of historical fact, dictators usually came to a bad end. This was basically changed when mass persuasion became scientific, using psychological mechanisms and techniques.

Then its power, because it was not imposed from outside but was internalized, became unlimited and nearly impregnable; aided by mass media whose barrage has no limits in space and is nearly continuous in time. This-besides nuclear weapons-is the great discovery of our age: the power of modeling men into automata 'buying' everything from toothpaste and the Beatles to presidents, atomic war, and self-destruction.

Homo sapiens, alienated by these powerful forces, is simply a puppet who has no other alternative but to live his life and play the role he has been assigned in the drama of creation.

from "The Stellar Man" by John Baines

Death..The Brain...and The Mind
Topic: intelligent living

from TIME magazine on-line

What Happens When We Die?

A fellow at New York's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week, Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S., and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project's origins, its skeptics, and the difference between the mind and the brain.

What sort of methods will this project use to try and verify people's claims of "near-death" experience?

When your heart stops beating, there is no blood getting to your brain. And so what happens is that within about ten seconds, brain activity ceases —as you would imagine. Yet paradoxically, ten or 20 percent of people who are then brought back to life from that period, which may be a few minutes or over an hour, will report having consciousness. So the key thing here is, are these real, or is it some sort of illusion? So the only way to tell is to have pictures only visible from the ceiling and nowhere else, because they claim they can see everything from the ceiling. So if we then get a series of 200 or 300 people who all were clinically dead, and yet they're able to come back and tell us what we were doing and were able see those pictures, that confirms consciousness really was continuing even though the brain wasn't functioning.

How does this project relate to society's perception of death?

People commonly perceive death as being a moment — you're either dead or you're alive. And that's a social definition we have. But the clinical definition we use is when the heart stops beating, the lungs stop working, and as a consequence the brain itself stops working. When doctors shine a light into someone's pupil, it's to demonstrate that there is no reflex present. The eye reflex is mediated by the brain stem and that's the area that keeps us alive; if that doesn't work then that means that the brain itself isn't working. At that point, I'll call a nurse into the room so I can certify that this patient is dead. Fifty years ago, people couldn't survive after that.

How is technology challenging the perception that death is a moment?

Nowadays, we have technology that's improved so that we can bring people back to life. In fact, there are drugs being developed right now — who knows if they'll ever make it to the market — that may actually slow down the process of brain-cell injury and death. Imagine, you fast-forward to ten years down the line and you've given a patient whose heart has just stopped this amazing drug, and actually what it does is it slows everything down so that the things that would've happened over an hour, now happen over two days. As medicine progresses, we will end up with lots and lots of ethical questions.

But what is happening to the individual at that time, what's really going on? Because there is a lack of blood flow, the cells go into a kind of a frenzy to keep themselves alive. And within about 5 minutes or so they start to damage or change. After an hour or so the damage is so great that even if we restart the heart again and pump blood, the person can no longer be viable because the cells have just been changed too much. And then the cells continue to change so that within a couple of days the body actually decomposes. So it's not a moment, it's a process that actually begins when the heart stops and culminates in the complete loss of the body, the decompositions of all the cells. However, ultimately what matters is, What's going on to a person's mind? What happens to the human mind and consciousness during death? Does that cease immediately as soon as the heart stops? Does it cease activity within the first 2 seconds, the first 2 minutes? Because we know that cells are continuously changing at that time. Does it stop after ten minutes, after half an hour, after an hour? And at this point we don't know.

What was your first interview like with someone who had reported an out-of-body experience?

Eye-opening and very humbling. Because what you see is that, first of all, they are completely genuine people who are not looking for any kind of fame or attention. In many cases they haven't even told anybody else about it because they're afraid of what people will think of them. I have about five hundred or so cases of people that I've interviewed since I first started out more than ten years ago. It's the consistency of the experiences, the reality of what they were describing. I managed to speak to doctors and nurses who had been present who said these patients had told them exactly what had happened and they couldn't explain it. I actually documented a few of those in my book What Happens When We Die because I wanted people to get both angles —not just the patients' side but also get the doctors' side — and see how it feels for the doctors to have a patient come back and tell them what was going on. There was a cardiologist that I spoke with who said he hasn't told anyone else about it because he has no explanation for how this patient could have been able to describe in detail what he had said and done. He was so freaked out by it that he just decided not to think about it anymore.

Why do you think there is such resistance to studies like yours?

Because we're pushing through the boundaries of science, working against assumptions and perceptions that have been fixed. A lot of people hold this idea that well, when you die you die, that's it. Death is a moment, you know you're either dead or you're alive. All these things are not scientifically valid but they're social perceptions. If you look back at the end of the 19th century, physicists at that time had been working with Newtonian laws of motion and they really felt they had all the answers to everything that was out there in the universe. When we look at the world around us, Newtonian physics is perfectly sufficient. It explains most things that we deal with. But then it was discovered that actually when you look at motion at really small levels —beyond the level of the atoms — Newton's laws no longer apply. A new physics was needed, hence, we eventually ended up with quantum physics. It caused a lot of controversy, even Einstein himself didn't believe in it.

Now, if you look at the mind, consciousness, and the brain, the assumption that the mind and brain are the same thing is fine for most circumstances, because in 99% of circumstances we can't separate the mind and brain, they work at the exactly the same time. But then there are certain extreme examples, like when the brain shuts down, that we see that that this assumption may no longer seem to hold true. So a new science is needed in the same way that we had to have a new quantum physics. The CERN particle accelerator may take us back to our roots. It may take us back to the first moments after the big bang, the very beginning. With our study, for the first time, we have the technology and the means to be able to investigate this. To see what happens at the end for us. Does something continue?

Ving Tsun Kung Fu on the internet
Topic: Ving Tsun

good article on Siu Nim Tao

http://www.tstvingtsun.bc.ca/HiddenPowerOfSNT_remix.html

also check out Ving Tsun Interactive

http://www.wingchuninteractive.com/

good stuff!

-Sifu

 

more on happiness
Topic: intelligent living
 "We must learn to be happy with what we have and not to live continually awaiting some special gift which we believe will make us happy. One who is not happy with what he has will never reach true happiness. It is necessary to live in the present; the only reality is now; the past and future are never real. Being able to awaken each morning in one's own bed, being able to breathe, to see what happens in each moment, to hear the song of birds, enjoy breakfast, and fully live each small moment; these are the realities."

 

From "The Secret Science", by John Baines (Dario Salas Sommer)

Have you evolved lately?
Topic: intelligent living

I think this applies well to the study of kung fu... 

 

"There are three basic stages to be fulfilled in order to be successful:

1. Motivation
2. Understanding
3. Practice

The result is evolution.

These are the three indispensable steps for the student to attain his goal. His motivation must be powerful; his understanding, deep; and his practice, intense. The result of all this is the evolution of the student. Yet what at first sight seems so simple is arduous and complex to accomplish. The student generally fails at one of the stages and evolution does not take place.

Many times the student reaches the following result:

1. Motivation
2.________
3. Practice

The result is stimulation of mass energy and there is no evolution.

In this case, the individual is carried away by his enthusiasm and skips over the second point, directly proceeding to practice. It is also possible, and this is very common, that his own inability to understand impels him to evade this stage. The result will then be a "stimulation of mass energy," that is, corporeal euphoria, but without the desired result, evolution.

We must realize the fundamental importance of profound understanding on the path of Hermeticism, as this is not a footpath of faith and self conviction. Without authentic understanding, nothing real is gained, only subjective illusions.

Frequently the following situation occurs:

1. Motivation: poor
2. Understanding: insufficient
3. Practice: scant

The result is insignificant evolution.

Occasionally a person's understanding and practice reach acceptable levels but motivation is deficient. In this case the individual lacks the fuel necessary to successfully reach his spiritual goal. "

-From "The Stellar Man" by John Baines