The Real World: It’s Tangible

We were born in the World…the Real World.

Blodgett CreekWe sense it, experience it, interact with it.

It’s the World.

There’s not a lot to say about it, except:

  • “Wow!”
  • “It’s amazing.”
  • “What a great place to practice Taiji!”

Let’s not get too abstract nor guess about where it came from or where it’s going reality. Fact is: we live here, in the World.

Let’s keep it simple…

Simply:

  • We live in a physical World.
  • There’s something called physics that describes some worldly laws.
  • Consider meta-physics: some things we don’t understand quite yet.

Nothing too weird nor esoteric about it: this is the place we live, we breathe, we stand, we move: where we each practice Taiji.

Watch the following video…the foundational, the fundamental, the grounding philosophy about: What’s Real in Real Taijiquan…

What’s Real: Physical Nature

It’s pretty simple.

Remember that we live in a real World…though…it’s not so easy to remember in these days, eh?

High-definition digital landscapes, online and at the movies, make our world abstract and surreal. Belief systems given to us as children and hammered into our sensory systems through media keep it tough. And too much deifying of hierarchies, of institutions, of Masters or Taiji systems compromises our ability to see the World clearly.

Keep it real…what impressions does this philosophy leave on you?

2 Responses to The Real World: It’s Tangible

  1. Chris says:
    15 May 2011 at 8:54 pm

    “what impressions does this philosophy leave on you?”

    It leaves me with the impression that I just got done talking philosophy with a child. Just to poke a few small holes in this; we’re talking about the physical world. You say this is a world we experience. How is this; how do we experience this physical world? A mind? What is the mind, is it physical too or is it aethereal, or is it both? If it’s physical, where is our mind?

    If you take the materialist stance (which you seem sworn to) and assume the mind is wherever the brain is, then it takes us back to the first question of how do we experience the world? How does information about the world get through an inch of bone, flesh, and blood to reach the mass that supposedly houses our minds? Is it the senses? Then your worldview is susceptible to the allegory of the cave. We depend on senses for information, and as plenty of diseased hospital patients will tell you, there is a long list of illnesses that impair our senses and sensory organs. My own eyes have many imperfections. My ears constantly have a high-pitched background ring. My ulnar nerve impaired the ability of some of my fingers to feel, back when I was in high school.

    Not to mention the fact that the universe according to physics is… unbelievably bigger than the small, narrow spectrum that humans can see. There’s xrays, gammarays, microwaves, infrared, all of this is exponentially greater than the visible spectrum.

    So, in brief, “Keeping it real,” the impression I receive from this philosophy is… immature, incomplete, unsatisfactory. A poor paradigm, I apologize.

  2. Steven Smith says:
    30 May 2011 at 4:18 pm

    Sweet. Philosophy is childish at this level, so that impression is okay with me. And I think children, in many ways, are more practical, realistic and contemplative (if given the chance) than adults.

    How we know what we know is a different level, sort of…we could consider it the next layer of sorts…epistemology. Though I consider that a bit too heady too. Phenomenology might be more fundamentally important in terms of using the body to understand, rather than the thinking-process that philosophy tends to emphasize.

    See: if we think too much about philosophy at least 2 things happen: we leave behind people who could care less about all this intellectualizing and, second, we get it wrong. Thinking is only a tiny portion of our total capacity. Feeling, sensing, moving: all these deserve more attention. Martial arts, meditation, and the like, attempt to put thinking in its place…take it out of its dominating role in our lives.

    So: good. This is a child-like level of philosophizing.

    We’re in the World. That’s amazing.