Thread: Metaphors
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Old 01-12-2011, 07:55 AM   #7
Nicholas Eschenbruch
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Re: Metaphors

Quote:
Mike Sigman wrote: View Post
Well, in the 1990's I ran into the fact that hara/tanden/dantien is actually a functional thing that literally controls the body. So the dantien has a physical development. Did people find out about the physical development of the dantien before or after the dantien *after* the dantien had been postulated in theory and cosmology as something important? That would defy logic.

I found out that the body when trained correctly behaves along the lines of the "flow" diagrams in acupuncture/TCM.... coincidence? I think not. And there a more areas that accumulate and seem to solidify the idea that much of the things that appear to be the work of the vivid imagination of Taoist sages actually turn out to be totally in line with some real and demonstrable physical phenomena. The coincidence-after-the-fact idea crumbles under the weight.
OK, I understand better what you meant. No objections....

Quote:
Mike Sigman wrote: View Post
What I think is that body-development along the practical physical qi/ki/prana/kokyu/shakti/jin lines could have long agao had a religious significance that was carried forward traditionally. So there would always have been an intermingling of religion and physical effect. It needs looking into because there's too much overlap for it all to just be coincidence.
Well, one approach would be that the body of course always reflects the totality a given civilisation's cosmology, or is even at the centre of it. My point was only, and I think Demetrio made it too, if more precisely, that there may not have been a distinction between the religious and the practical in the first place - for the "ancients", whoever they were, it was a seamless whole.

In such a view, it all got muddled with the cross-cultural translations into a new ("modern", "western", "scientific") paradigm, which introduced the distinctions we make between religion and physics in the first place. And dropped some things as "daoist phantasies" that were not. And we (or rather, people like you) are still clearing up the resulting mess and trying to get some order....

But maybe that's semantics for historians and social anthropologists

my 2 cent

Last edited by Nicholas Eschenbruch : 01-12-2011 at 07:57 AM. Reason: added sentence last full paragraph
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