The Role of Zen in Martial ArtsWritten by Jeffrey M. Miller
It's said that roots of many of Martial Arts is in India, with Buddhist monks. While many sources give conflicting data, it's known that in Japan, only places that were large enough to allow for indoor training during inclement weather, were huge Buddhist temples. In fact, much of what is done in Martial Arts schools with a Japanese background comes from, and can be traced back to this connection.For example, white uniforms were attire of Japanese Buddhist monks and lay-people alike. The kyu and dan "class" and "level" grade rankings were originally developed for and used as markers for how much a monk had learned and progressed through his training. And, much of etiquette within dojos "training halls") is identical to those used in these same temples to show respect to all that has gone before me and to all that I aspire to become. In fact, Japanese kanji characters used to write word 'dojo' actually refer to "a place where enlightenment takes place." Now, before you run out and scream about quitting for fear of being converted to Buddhism, Hinduism, or some other 'foreign', sacrilegious cult - don't panic. Buddhism, while often practiced like many conventional Western religions, is not really a religion at all - at least not way most people define or practice a so-called 'religion'. As developed by founder Siddhartha Gautoma, refered to as Buddha ("one who is awake"), and fine-tuned over past two and a half - plus centuries, Buddhism is a philosophy of personal development whereby practitioner works to understand his or her true nature and immutable laws of universe that govern world and everything in it. It is not at all a belief system as are many religions today, but instead relies on student coming to an intimate understanding of reality and truth through direct, personal experience. One of monks credited with developing martial Arts in Buddhist temples of time was known as Bodhidharma, founder of Zen. This new training was readily adopted by monks for many reasons. And while monks may have been interested in defending themselves from unfriendly outsiders, it is also likely that they also wished to prepare themselves for demands of their daily lives - lives which required that they sat unmoving for hours while in deep meditative practice. The Martial arts they practiced were a great means of physical exercise while still being based heavily on their philosophical beliefs of peace through "understanding conflict."
| | Science vs. HealersWritten by Robert Bruce Baird
Sherry (My ex) had a couple of problems of a medical nature. Her hypoglycemia had been miss-diagnosed and she had been given massive cortisone shots that I believe had contributed to cancer that resulted in partial mastectomy. I got her off caffiene and through power of LOVE she was healed in two years. Women are not treated as men are when it comes to medical treatment; as well as every other aspect of misogyny in society. My studies of wholistics and hermetics were becoming quite extensive and alchemy founded and continues real science. I am going to quote two authors from quite different sides of fence. These books are recent but representative of studies I was engaged in as well as giving reader an insight to continuing problem of censorship and supposed 'expertise' that prevents a great deal of truth. David Depew and Bruce Weber of MIT wrote 'Darwinism Evolving' in 1995 and it says on pages 492 & 493: “They also made it harder for scientific worldview to be received with equanimity by other sources of culture. Indeed, since reducing impulse undermines fairly huge tracts of experience, people like Wallace, who feel deeply about protecting phenomena they regard as existentially important, frequently conclude that they have no alternative except to embrace spiritualism, and sometimes even to attack scientific worldview itself, if that is only way to protect important spheres of experience that have been ejected from science's confining Eden. In response, scientists and philosophers who feel strongly about liberating potential of a spare, materialistic worldview began to patrol borderlands between high-grade knowledge scientists have of natural systems and low-grade opinions that in view of science's most ardent defenders, dominate other spheres of culture and lead back toward superstitious and authoritarian world of yester-year. 'Demarcating' science from other, less cognitively worthwhile forms of understanding was already a major feature of Darwin's world. A line beyond which Newtonian {Newton was a Rosicrucian who achieved status of an alchemist per Haeffner's 'Dictionary of Alchemy') paradigm could not apply was drawn at boundary between physics and biology. We have seen how hesitant Darwin was to cross that line and what happened when he did. Twentieth-century people are sometimes prone to congratulate themselves for being above these quaint Victorian battles. They may have less reason to do so, however, than they think, for fact is that throughout our own century, same sort of battles with emotional overtones no less charged, have been waged at contested line where biology meets psychology, and more generally where natural sciences confront human sciences. Dualisms between spirit and matter, and even between mind and body, may have been pushed to margins of respectable intellectual discourse. But methodological dualisms between what is covered by laws and what is to be 'hermeneutically appropriated' are still very much at center of our cultural, or rather 'two cultural', life. Cognitive psychologists and neurophysiologists are even now busy reducing mind- states to brain-states, while interpretive or humanistic psychologists are proclaiming how meaningless world would be if mind is nothing but brain. Interpretive anthropologists are filled with horror at what would disappear from world if rich cultural practices that seem to give meaning to our lives were to be shown to be little more than extremely sophisticated calculations on part of self-interested genes. Conflicts of this sort would have given Darwin stomachaches almost as bad as ones he endured over earlier demarcation controversies." These authors use term hermeneuts much as early 20th Century supposed scientists ridiculed quantum physicists by calling them 'atom-mysticists'. Hermeneuts is a new epithet for alchemists such as myself who OBSERVE and try to fit ALL facts together and don't eject anything 'from science's confining Eden'. This quote continues to raise spectre of 'Bible Narrative' and Bishop Ussher whose late nineteenth century proponent was Wilberforce. "The rhetorical pattern of these battles is still depressingly similar, in fact, to Huxley's confrontation with Wilberforce. Hermeneuts ridicule scientists like Hamilton, Dawkins, and Wilson when they suggest that nothing was ever known about social cooperation until biologists discovered kin selection. Reductionists in turn criticize hermeneuts, now transformed largely into 'culturists', for bringing back ghosts and gods, just as their nineteenth-century predecessors were taxed with being 'vitalists' every time they said something about complexity of development. Humanists identify scientists with an outdated materialistic reductionism. Scientists insist that hermeneutical intentionality is little more than disguised religion. Perhaps, a way out of this fruitless dialectic between 'two cultures', can be found if each party could give up at least one of its cherished preconceptions. It would be a good thing, for example, if heirs of Enlightenment {Credited to Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson and others with an alchemical background.} would stop thinking that if cultural phenomena are not reduced to some sort of mechanism, religious authoritarianism will immediately flood into breach. They should also stop assuming that nothing is really known about human beings until spirit of reductionism gets to work. Students of human sciences have, after all, been learning things alongside scientists ever since modernity began. Among other things they have learned that humans are individuated as persons within bonds of cultures and cultural roles, they are bound together with others in ways no less meaningful and valuable than ways promoted by strongly dualistic religions. By same token, it would be helpful if advocates of interpretive disciplines would. abandon a tacit assumption sometimes found among them that nature is so constituted that it can never accommodate rich and meaningful cultural phenomena humanists are dedicated to protecting, and that therefore cultural 'ought never' to be allowed to slip comfortably into naturalism. Humanists seem to have internalized this belief from their reductionist enemies, whose commitment to materialism is generally inseparable from their resolve to show up large parts of culture, especially religion, as illusions. These opponents, we may safely say, take in each other's laundry."
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