Customer Reviews

Mind Over Matter: Higher Martial Arts

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Pass on this one. It is poor philosophy and worse science. It's descriptions of what happens (or can happen) in martial arts training lack the poetry and even the clarity of the Chinese classics. Not one experiment. Not one case study. Looking for some help on how tai chi chuan works and how best to train, I did not find it.

This book is more of an academic approach to the internal martial arts than th zen koan parable style I'm used to. I'm sure if you spent months pouring over every page and looking up every 10 dollar word, you might actually reap some benefit from this book. But if you're looking for some spiritual insight, some quaint story that will enhance your being and improve your practise, look elsewhere.

I liked the book. It attempts to make the case for an aproach between the modern science and traditional martial arts saying that both are complementary and necessary for a breakthrough in consciousness research. The book also proceeds to describe consciousness refining consciousness through internal martial arts.

It is not a book that deals with technique or gives advice on internal arts. IMO, it is an interesting reading for the serious martial artist and scholar.

It is a short book but hard to read due to long, flowery phrases.

I have no idea what the purpose of this book was. I kept reading it, hoping I would glean some insight, some guidepost,but it never happened. This book was terrible.

Okay, if you're a philosophy major, maybe you'll get something from this book. But for a man of Western science, struggling to apprehend the subtleties of higher-order Eastern martial arts, this was of no benefit to me.

Shi Ming asserts that we need to use Western science to more fully define Qi. He then admits that while technology is progressing, it is still not sufficient to this need. He implies that defining Qi scientifically will result in considerable benefit to humanity.

Shi Ming talks about the history of China, particularly how the various political upheavals were detrimental to the transmission of Qi understanding through the generations.

Shi Ming pulls out every big word he can think of, and uses them in repetitive tautological reiterative fashion, to state that the world must try and advance itself, enlighten itself. That understanding Qi is the key to overcoming political, religious, and philosophical barriers.

Tidbits that I almost found useful: Shi Ming alleges that Qi is real. That it is something beyond the "zone" that professional athletes sometimes talk about. That it is beyond an instinctive ingraining of skills (such as Olympic boxers) from intense training. But he never quite tells us what he thinks it really is, and he never hints at how to develop or find Qi, except to find a good instructor.

I'll match my education resume with anyone's. I'm no dummy. But I have to admit that sometimes I'll read philosophy and not even have a clue whatis being talked about. This book was like that. All I can tell was that Mr Shi Ming has some nice ideals for a better world, and that somehow he thinks Qi cultivation is the answer. But Higher Martial Arts? Too high. We're talking about World Peace, and all I want to do is become better at internal martial arts.

Maybe this book would be good for that individual on the cusp of attaining enlightenment or sainthood. I'm not close to that, so it did me no good at all. Maybe if I reach that cusp, I'll try to re-read the book and see what I get out of it.... Nah.

I saw video footage of Shi Ming many years ago, on the BBC's Healing and the Mind documentary; what he demonstrated defied explanation at the time, and so I wrote him off as a fake. Subsequently, I forgot about him and the video, but one day I purchased this book out of interest, without recognising at all that it was authored by the same individual in the video.

Having studied a martial art for a decade already, (Aikido for 16 years now, and Tai Ji for 4) I found the material then to be fascinating, very deep, and very advanced, and still pertinent to my training now. The writing style is very dense, concise, almost bulging with detail, but also very dry, impartial - almost clinical in its description of the processes of transformation that can be achieved through training. And the book really is only intended for someone who is actively training, and has done so for many years. It is not meant to be an academic document, ready to stand the rigours of peer review, because frankly, there would not be many peers of Shi Ming's level, and secondly, he wrote it for the martial artist, as a guide to map out one's training goals well into one's future. What is all the more attractive about this book is that he writes in a way that speaks to all arts, not just the Tai Ji, which is his background. He does not get bogged down on styles or arts, but just focusses on the "psycho-physical" processes that occur while training in an art that has an aspect of softness and development of "internal" power.

The book withstands many re-readings, in fact, often the light comes on with some of this material only after reading it through several times. It is useless to pick out a random passage from a random page and quote anything from this work...the whole document is a train of thought that begins with simple concepts and develops throughout the course of the text, to a highly advanced exposition on the transformative process that conscisouness can, and does undergo, through prolonged training in an internal art. It is difficult to understand, nay, believe what the author writes about in the later chapters of the book, if you have not personally experienced and understood the content of the earlier chapters. I was able to follow the author's train of thought without difficulty until about around chapter 8-9, and then I am on unfamiliar ground. So the later chapters for me suggest "what is possible", and what to strive for.

Only much later did I recognise that the author's photo on the back cover was in fact of the same man on the video I saw years before. I realised after reading his words, that I had to make a serious reappraisal of the video footage, because knowing the thoughts of this man through his writing caused me to rethink that he may very well have been demonstrating something that was not fake at all, but very real...and that my friends, is very scary. He teaches (or did) in Purple Bamboo Park in Beijing every morning...go check him out for yourself.

I have to chime in with those who thought this book was obtuse. I have a strong background in philosophy, science, and Chinese martial arts - and none of that could rescue me a very good understanding from this book. Why is that? It's because the "philosophy" presented here is primarily psuedo-philosophy. The book reads like a long article that no peer-reviewed journal would accept.

Granted, there are a few good tidbits, but most of the book is poorly formulated. Here's an example, just taken at random from page 33: "Consciousness is a spiritual-material structure, consisting of a triad of information, capacity, and format. Only when it can perform effectively as such a structure can it function interactively with any spirit or matter at all. Consciousness has a field, and it has force; it is a supranormal consciousness whose own inherent capacity can activate other capacities, forming a potent force field."

This goes on, and on, and on, and is never well explained. If you "think" you know what that passage means, you are likely confused. The passage I quoted is ambiguous in so many ways. For instance, do the authors mean that consciousness can ONLY be "interactive" when "information, capacity, and format" are somehow optimized? That's preposterous. I may be extremely ignorant (I am), but that doesn't mean my consciousness doesn't function "interactively". This is another problem: what do the authors mean when they say things like "interactively", "spiritual-material structure", "inherent capacity", "perform effectively" etc.? They never really define their base terms very well - and this causes no end of confusion. What are they even talking about?

If you are a philosopher or a scientist, steer clear - this reads like it was written by a lit crit major who took a single course on Kant and then synthesized all that with Tai Qi Quan. You can't run away fast enough.

If you are a martial artist, almost any book on the martial arts will give you more bang for your buck than this book.

I try to be as fair as possible in reviewing things, so I admit it may be possible that this book was poorly translated. But Thomas Cleary translated it, and I have a lot of respect for his work, so I somehow doubt he is at fault for this.

". . . we must be careful not to take up simplifications [Kant] and vulgarizations [fool's gold]which would lead to the sort of attitude with which a dwarf views a giant, or the attitude of blind men feeling an elephant. And we absolutely cannot make this philosophy into a passive object of scientific research, or a dead specimen, without actual experiential evidence." That evidence is you once you begin to stop fragmenting your experience into discrete modes of recognition. This is a book written for people who have already removed their shoes. Each time I am called back to it, I find more assistance. From another angle, Shi Ming's Mind Over Matter is the most profound explication of Chinese history I have ever read. If you want to know China and have read a fair amount of Chinese history and philosophy--including some Western philosophy--this book will bring you to another understanding. If you want to know about the marshaled energy emission, the book is also helpful, within a rather small and abstract realm. If you want to know, you'll have to give yourself up. Any other method is pointless.

Great how openly a chinese person suggests to view the advantages of western and eastern thinking and to aim for their integration. Decades of experiences in martial arts must back up the insights especially concerning the mind work. I got a glimpse how and trust that one can work on oneselve.