CHI ? Have a look at This Clip Sifu Mooney moves subjects without touching them.

[Tez3]

This clip is brought up with monotonous regularity on an MMA site I go on and is always used to 'prove' that TMAs don't work.
As Cruentus said, why was this thread revived? Sane, logical and experienced martial artists know the chi balls don't exist outside fantasy.
I believe in 'life force' for want of a better word, inner strength, will to live, self belief or whatever. You can lower your blood pressure through self hypnosis/meditation or whatever works for you but I do not believe you can knock someone over by the force of your will/chi/ki whatever.
I can however make the class stand/sit still or be quiet instantly by using a certain look or tone of voice. Magical? No, RAF officer training lol! Ask any sergeant major or drill instructor! It works just as well on civilians as it does on military people.

 

[exile]

any person that has studyed the internal arts can tell you its something that needs to be experienced not explained
.

Ah yes... alas, this is eventually where all such assertions wind up: basically, in the `it just is, you have to experience it, it's beyond explanation' drawer, right next to the `it doesn't work if you don't accept/believe/understand it' file. The fact is, (i) there is nothing remotely like even a shred of evidence under reasonably controlled conditions for the `chi-impact' phenomenon you're claiming exists; and (ii) there are stacks of studies of eyewitness behavior, subjective report reliability and other controlled investigations of the discrepancy between what people think is going on, what they think others are doing, and what they think they're doing which make it clear that such self-reports are almost worthless.

Remember the whole Uri Geller scam from a generation ago? James Randi and other stage magicians replicated Geller's tricks, but far more spectacularly, using clever extensions of standard stage techniques, but the believers insisted that Geller had been doing something else, even though they couldn't say what it was, and even though Geller had—prior to his career as a born-again psychic—had a successful career in Israel as a... stage magician! :lol:

People whose livelihoods depend on human gullibility are very adept at persuading us that we're experiencing things which require us to posit something Out There that defies rational explanation. And some of us are more than happy to cooperate with them. It's the bread-and-butter of con artists and purveyors of Things We Don't Understand, and people will go on believing it, regardless of the fact that no replicable demonstrations of these things under controlled conditions can be given. When Geller went on Johnny Carson to strut his stuff, he was a complete bust... because like Geller, Carson too had been a professional stage magician, and instituted a few simple precautions targeting the specific tricks that he was pretty sure, from his own knowledge of the game, that Geller was using. As Cruentus says, this stuff requires committed belief, or considerable general credulity, including the conviction that just because you can talk yourself into believing that you're experiencing something, you really are.

I think back to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote an entire book arguing that fairies actually existed, that there were photographs of them that had been taken by two young girls, and who in an early filmed interview proclaimed that he knew that fairies, pixies and the like existed, from his own experience. Of course, later photographic enhancements of the Cottingsly fairies, as they came to be called after the girls' home village, showed the fakery in brilliant detail: bits of cut-out drawing that had been attached to threads and wires. But Conan Doyle was absolutely convinced, to his dying day, that he had seen genuine photographs of fairies, and that the inability of the girls to reproduce photos of fairies when there were people present monitoring the proceedings against fraud was simply the result of the "wee folk" 's aversion to skeptics. Were he alive today and exposed to the right `martial art' circles, he'd have no problem convincing himself that he was experiencing `chi power', I'm sure!

 

[grydth]

I was going to ask that same question.

Possibly so I could post this link, which I'm sure everyone has seen but which bears repeating:

What this proves is that believing your own snot will get you killed every time. Reality sometimes packs a very hard right.

 

[Xue Sheng]

Ah yes... alas, this is eventually where all such assertions wind up: basically, in the `it just is you have to experience it, it's beyond explanation' drawer, right next to the `it doesn't work if you don't accept/believe/understand it' file. The fact is, (i) there is nothing remotely like even a shred of evidence under reasonably controlled conditions for the `chi-impact' phenomenon you're claiming exists; and (ii) there are stacks of studies of eyewitness behavior, subjective report reliability and other controlled investigations of the discrepancy between what people think is going on, what they think others are doing, and what they think they're doing which make it clear that such self-reports are almost worthless.

Well actually exile the reason you are entirely unable to respond to my post at this very moment is because I am using my VAST powers of qi to repel your fingers from your keyboard... I would explain how I do it... but you would not understand...... mainly because to explain it I must speak gibberish in order to explain it properly.....

OK I will let you again touch your keyboard and respond now :asian: :uhyeah:

I could go into the whole story again of the respected CMA guy that had an encounter with one of these guys or I could talk of my experiences with these type of guys that can do such amazing qi stunts but I have done that so many times on MT that I no longer wish to go into it.... suffice to say it all comes down to the same thing.... they have taught their students how to fall down.

 

[exile]

Well actually exile the reason you are entirely unable to respond to my post at this very moment is because I am using my VAST powers of qi to repel your fingers from your keyboard... I would explain how I do it... but you would not understand...... mainly because to explain it I must speak gibberish in order to explain it properly.....

OK I will let you again touch your keyboard and respond now :asian: :uhyeah:

Whoa, dude, you had me really locked up there! :lol:

I could go into the whole story again of the respected CMA guy that had an encounter with one of these guys or I could talk of my experiences with these type of guys that can do such amazing qi stunts but I have done that so many times on MT that I no longer wish to go into it.... suffice to say it all comes down to the same thing.... they have taught their students how to fall down.

And that's it—game, set and match!

Ask yourselves, you undecided ones, how many times you ever get to see this kind of stunt performed against students from some other school, or a bunch of others schools, as vs. the Chi-demonstrator's own pupils? EVER?? How many times have you ever seen this move effectively pulled on known, vocal skeptics? Isn't it just a tad... troubling... that what you see, almost without exception, is a demo with the Chi-ter (sorry, I really couldn't resist) being the principal instructor or school operator, and the ukes being...his students???.

No one doubts that there are very interesting psychophysical processes that people with sufficient training can induce when they're in deep meditative states; plenty of research has been carried out under lab conditions that suggest systematic alterations in blood pressure, and blood circulation, in individuals who can attain such states. But nothing about this documentation requires us to posit a novel form of energy; what we're learning is that the nervous system admits a greater degree of conscious guidance than we previously thought, and that there are linkages between mental states and physical processes that are probably mediated by alignment and training of internal rhythmic markers such as breathing. The existence of links between mental and physical phenomena is hardly surprising, even to reductionists who take mental phenomena to be projections of physiological and biochemical effects—the shadows thrown by our neurochemical wiring. But if you want to reify `Chi-energy' into something like the flaming balls of `pure force' that Marvel superheroes seem to be particularly good at conjuring up, you better have lots and lots of very hard data to back up that level of extraordinary claim...

 

[Xue Sheng]

Whoa, dude, you had me really locked up there! :lol:

DON'T make me have to do that again :mst:

Ask yourselves, you undecided ones, how many times you ever get to see this kind of stunt performed against students from some other school, or a bunch of others schools, as vs. the Chi-demonstrator's own pupils? EVER?? How many times have you ever seen this move effectively pulled on known, vocal skeptics? Isn't it just a tad... troubling... that what you see, almost without exception, is a demo with the Chi-ter (sorry, I really couldn't resist) being the principal instructor or school operator, and the ukes being...his students???.

No one doubts that there are very interesting psychophysical processes that people with sufficient training can induce when they're in deep meditative states; plenty of research has been carried out under lab conditions that suggest systematic alterations in blood pressure, and blood circulation, in individuals who can attain such states. But nothing about this documentation requires us to posit a novel form of energy; what we're learning is that the nervous system admits a greater degree of conscious guidance than we previously thought, and that there are linkages between mental states and physical processes that are probably mediated by alignment and training of internal rhythmic markers such as breathing. The existence of links between mental and physical phenomena is hardly surprising, even to reductionists who take mental phenomena to be projections of physiological and biochemical effects—the shadows thrown by our neurochemical wiring. But if you want to reify `Chi-energy' into something like the flaming balls of `pure force' that Marvel superheroes seem to be particularly good at conjuring up, you better have lots and lots of very hard data to back up that level of extraordinary claim...

Agreed

And I have one last comment.

I do not know about now but a few years back the Qigong department of the Beijing University of Traditional Chinese medicine said that the majority of the people out there demonstrating Internal Qi energy (in the manor that has been shown in clip after clip after clip here on MT aka the no touch knockout) are fake. They also said that there was currently no way to measure internal Qi but they were working on a way to measure it. As far as I know they have not been successful as of yet, if they are even still working on it.

 

[tellner]

How do you measure something that isn't there? :disgust:

 

[kempocat]

any person that has studyed the internal arts can tell you its something that needs to be experienced not explained
.

-----------------------------------
this topic is almost always fruitless but I still comment on it every now and then because it is so very interesting to me
.
I would be making the same comments as most of you if it were not for my own personal investigation
.
please allow me to ask a slightly off track question
have any of you ever felt a feeling in your hands that felt like your hands were two repeling magnets?
.
thank you Keith Bryan

 

[Tez3]

-----------------------------------
this topic is almost always fruitless but I still comment on it every now and then because it is so very interesting to me
.
I would be making the same comments as most of you if it were not for my own personal investigation
.
please allow me to ask a slightly off track question
have any of you ever felt a feeling in your hands that felt like your hands were two repeling magnets?
.
thank you Keith Bryan

No

 

[exile]

No

Me neither, Tez...

-----------------------------------
I would be making the same comments as most of you if it were not for my own personal investigation.

Look... the whole point, kempocat, is that the direct evidence of your senses is not in itself necessarily evidence for—let alone confirmation of—a particular externally real state of affairs. We know that you can experience sensations that seem to correspond to some event you're involved in which we can show is not happening. What you experience subjectively can be vastly different from what's really happening to you, but you may—especially in an uncontrolled situation with no external monitoring—not be able to recognize this.

It's an old problem. Look at what's probably the classic example of this dilemma in literature: Shakespeare's Hamlet. He sees a ghost, pursues it, and get the information from it that it's his father's ghost, that his father was murdered by his uncle, and that the ghost wants Hamlet to avenge his death (i.e., kill his uncle). Now what the hell do you do when you get a summons like that?? Hamlet dislikes his uncle intenselly anyway, but does he just go off and skewer his father's brother (who is also his new stepfather)? Hamlet reminds Horatio, just as you are trying to tell us, that `there are more things in heaven and earth/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.' Sure, but he doesn't stop there! Notice what else he says:

The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil; and the devil hath power
T'assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds
More relative than this.
​

(my emphasis; `relative' here is understood to mean `well-founded'). Hamlet would love nothing better than to believe that his uncle is a murderer, but he knows that his fixated contempt for his uncle, leading to `my weakness and my melancholy', may make him vulnerable to deception. Even though he wants to believe the ghost, he insists on testing his vision, via the famous Mousetrap play-within-a-play, to see if Claudius himself gives the game away. Hamlet is here the supreme rational skeptic, well aware that his own `personal investigation', as you put it, is insufficient: he has to have impersonal proof that what he's experienced isn't a cruel illusion.

So this question is nothing new, and the issues haven't changed. Your subjective conviction that something has happened along the lines you believe is no guarantee whatever that it actually has happened like that. We're all too prone to take our experiences literally, and not step back, as Hamlet does, and demand something harder in the way of proof.

 

[Tez3]

My instructor has been doing martial arts for about thirty five years, he's a fighter, he does martial arts to fight whether its as a close protection officer, or when he was spec forces or doing the doors or in the ring/cage, car parks etc. He's looked at many martial arts, trained in quite a few and taken as many weapons as he can from them. If Chi as in chucking balls of it at people and knocking them down existed he would surely be doing it. . . . . he isn't. And how much easier would it be to knock people down from a distance than actually having to punch them? If it worked don't you think that it wouldn't be a secret anymore? Governments are always looking for 'secret' weapons, ways to protect presidents, prime ministers etc. If it worked we would be seeing it.
I'm afraid any magnetism I feel is usually in the company of attractive men !

 

[kempocat]

thanks for your honest answer (NO)
has anyone else? I have and I can tell you that the stronger I feel the stronger the sensation if I am angry I can not produce this feeling
.
I have transfered this feeling or push to others but have found that doing so makes me feel weak
.
I have nothing to gain by sharing this I am not an instructor and I am not selling anything I am just sharing my experience on this subject
.
I am in no way saying that this could be used to defend but I have been told it can be also I am in no way saying this can be used to heal others but I have been told it can
.
I am only sharing what I have proved to my self
I remember the first time my body emitted this very mild repeling force I couldnt believe it I thought I was amagining it or my joints were stiff so I continued to exsperiment for years Im not asking you to believe Im just telling you I do
.
I think that while it may be true that Mr. Mooneys students are somewhat conditioned to fall or be pushed back out of respect. I also firmly believe that richard mooney has the same ability that I do but much stronger if you were to ask him about the first time he discovered this ability I think he would also tell you how suprized he was too
.
now if you havent felt this repeling force Im sure it sounds like some type of deception
.
I think everyone can produce this feeling but very few will take the time to try

 

[jks9199]

Is there something to some forms of chi-energy? Sure. Accupuncture and accupressure can be shown to have a definite effect, in some specific cases.

And I've felt what I'll call "pulling" from someone, and can even occasionally manage to do it myself. Is it some sort of energy, or is it just some how suggesting to the other person that they're being pulled? I don't know. And... it's not exactly real useful for fighting. The pull is maybe enough to make the subject lean/roll a hair... Not unbalance them. And I've felt someone project warmth (a few degrees)... Again, unless giving someone a slightly flush is combat effective, there's no real fighting application that I'm aware of.

But there is definitely a human ability to sense human intent and focus; most people I know have had that crawly "I'm being watched" feeling. Or been in an argument with someone where their anger/glare was so intense it almost felt like a punch.

 

[Sukerkin]

Kempo, I'm sure that a thousand of us telling you otherwise will not change your mind one whit with your present frame of reference. But that does not mean that I do not wish you to re-think.

Ki exists, yes, I agree. But it is a way in which the conscious mind is tricked by itself into overcoming physical limits that are imposed by previous experience. This means that I learnt how to stick my fist through a board that I had thought unbreakable or that I was able to throw a friend of mine, twice my size, across the room from a kneeling position. It does not mean that I can now summon up Mystical-Chi to blast my opponents with.

I concur that there are things that surround us that we do not yet understand, which is why altho' I may have more or less closed the book on the existence of God, I do not discount the influence of flows of energy (electrical, magnetic or other) on how we think, feel and behave. But they are subtle changes on the energy states of neurons in the brain, not an emission of power that can actually be felt by another. The amount of energy required to produce a physical external effect on someone is very large compared to that necessary to adjust the outcome of a sequence of chemical energy exchanges in the brain.

I don't like to be blunt when talking about something that a person obviously seriously believes (unless it happens to be insane reactions to naming a teddy bear) so I shall leave it at the wish that you think again and the hope that you haven't been spending lots of money on such training.

 

[Xue Sheng]

Kempo, I'm sure that a thousand of us telling you otherwise will not change your mind one whit with your present frame of reference. But that does not mean that I do not wish you to re-think.

Ki exists, yes, I agree. But it is a way in which the conscious mind is tricked by itself into overcoming physical limits that are imposed by previous experience. This means that I learnt how to stick my fist through a board that I had thought unbreakable or that I was able to throw a friend of mine, twice my size, across the room from a kneeling position. It does not mean that I can now summon up Mystical-Chi to blast my opponents with.

I concur that there are things that surround us that we do not yet understand, which is why altho' I may have more or less closed the book on the existence of God, I do not discount the influence of flows of energy (electrical, magnetic or other) on how we think, feel and behave. But they are subtle changes on the energy states of neurons in the brain, not an emission of power that can actually be felt by another. The amount of energy required to produce a physical external effect on someone is very large compared to that necessary to adjust the outcome of a sequence of chemical energy exchanges in the brain.

I don't like to be blunt when talking about something that a person obviously seriously believes (unless it happens to be insane reactions to naming a teddy bear) so I shall leave it at the wish that you think again and the hope that you haven't been spending lots of money on such training.

Well said :asian:

I too believe that Qi (Chinese word) exists but I have serious doubts when it comes to the projection of Qi outside of ones self.

 

[kempocat]

I respect that you feel that I have convinced my self of something that is not possible in your minds
.
but I ask that you leave a small portion of your mind open to things that you have have not yet expeienced
.
I wish you all well
Keith Bryan

 

[tellner]

"We should believe in anything" does not follow from "We don't know everything." There are tools and principles for investigating the unknown. Believing things because we want them to be true is not one of the better ones. When it is compounded by wanting to believe them because it means we are part of some special Elect wishful thinking is compounded by admitted bias and egotism.

And that is just plain stupid.

 

[exile]

kempocat, what Tellner, Sukerkin, jks and I have been trying to tell you, using different analogies and lines of argument, is something very basic about coming to conclusions on the basis of evidence and experience.

For example, say you subconsciously register certain facts about the environment around you which add up to something not being quite right. So you behave more carefully than you might have done, and it turns out that you were right: a really violent fight between two groups breaks out right next to you, and because you've been expecting it, you're able to get under cover quickly while other passers-by get injured in the violence. Now you can say, ah, there it is, proof that there is foreknowledge, or clairvoyance, or whatever. Look, I experienced it! But the fact is, you haven't. What you experienced was the sudden, unexpected awareness of danger in the absence of consciously received information about that danger. But that isn't the same as the mystical/magical/psychic power many people would attribute your experience to, and the fact is, we know that people absorb and process information subconsciously that often leads them to correct deductions.

Do you see what I'm saying? There are two different things going on: one, your possession of a certain sense of imminent danger; the other your explanation of that sense of danger. You can attribute that knowledge to ESP, or divine intervention, or any number of things, but the fact of your experience doesn't in itself explain that experience. It's merely the data; the explanation has to be arrived at by reasonining, and factual evidence.

There's a general rule you may have heard: extraordinary claims demand correspondingly extraordinary levels of proof. Given that we have tons of evidence that people are able to observe tiny discrpancies in the expected course of situations as they develop, and make rapid and unconsious inferences based on those observations, there is no motivation for attributing your sense of imminent danger in my imagined example to `psy power', when your normal functioning awareness of how things should be and when they aren't going that way accounts perfectly for that danger sense. If we have independent reason to believe that the earth revolves around the sun and the moon around the earth, then why would we imagine an eclipse to arise from a gigantic wolf periodically devouring and then regurgitating the moon, when our best astronomical models already tell us the circumstances under which such events will take place, and exactly when they will?

What we are trying to tell you is that you are opting for an extremely unlikely solution when there any number of far more conventional pictures of what goes on that can account for what you've experienced (look at jks' post for a plausible suggestion). The important point, in terms of what you've been saying, is that your experiences do not in themselves provide any evidence that chi-ball pie fights ever really take place. Those experiences mere constitute evidence that something gave rise to certain perceptions on your part. You don't know what those are, and there are far more likely sources for them than a novel, inexplicable form of `energy'. It would be nice, maybe, to live in a magical universe, but unfortunately, it doesn't look as though that's what we've got....

 

[kempocat]

please read this carefuly
your references to chi ball fights and other kung fu theater fantasy have no place here and only serve to insult
.
what I am telling you also has nothing to do with fighting or defending
.
(I can feel one hand repel the other and this mimics magnetics) here is my personal thoughts on this the body operates using electrical signals and these signals are controled by your mind so if you take the time to bring your attention to your palms and relax with given enough practice you will be able to direct your bodys electrical signals to your hands . now I need you to understand that any time current is flowing through a conductor it will produce a magnetic field the more current the stronger the field . now seeing as how each hand is producing its own bio electrical field they will repel each other somewhat
.
it is interesting to me that they do not ever attract each other but I can tell you that each palm behaves just as apposing magnets would if they are not lined up they tend to slip off each other
.
I believe this is nothing more than the bodys bio electrical field .
.
I wish you all knew me better you would know that I am a very logic based skeptic and a realist for example I reject all the pretty dance steps used in some arts that have nothing to do with attacking or defending I also reject silk gi's and any other ego based item and I believe the belt systems only purpose is for children as a reward and for school owners as a way to generate income . but I am getting a little off track here for a living I am a mechanic and I currently build and test cryogenic rocket engines and components for the space program so I do understand how to conduct experiments and isolate what is real and what is not using a series of controls
.
please do not dismis without investigation I invite you to try chi gung metitation after a while I am confident that you will be able to feel your own bodys electro magnetic field too
.
it is always uncomfortable discussing this topic but I find it to be very interesting
.
Enjoy

 

[Sukerkin]

I think perhaps part of the reason why you might feel a little embattled on this is the plain and simple fact that we don't know you and your initial posts have been tied to a subject that is seen to reside in the "Bad Reputation" area of martial arts.

So please don't feel too personally assailed when a number of posts of the "Don't be daft!" ilk appear. It is not the messenger but the message that is being held in low regard.

I've read what you've said again and I see that you are not actually advocating the veracity of telekinetic martial arts but rather a heightened state of awareness of your own senses. Nothing too controversial in that - it's analagous to the sensation you get when you close your eyes and bring a pen or pencil close to the location of the so-called Third Eye in the middle of the forehead. Come to that, it's part and parcel of zanshin, as Exile touched on previously.

I don't personally believe that the sensation you report is attributable to the cause you cite but it doesn't hurt anyone else if you choose to believe it and you don't seem to be trying a "Snake Oil" sell to make money out of it, so I see no cause to upbraid you for such views (not that I would necessarily have a right to do that in the first place of course ).

However, for a practical analysis of the topic, the energy levels involved are so low that I suspect the energy required for the senses to operate to try and detect it would be overwhelming the 'field' anyway. We all operate on electrical energy when it comes down to it and all emit and are affected by magnetic fields as a consequence of that. To try and 'feel' your own magnetic field by using the very sensors that create that field in part does not 'work' for me.

The fields that surround the 400kV SGT's I work around on the other hand ...