Running commentary by Joe Deisher
Terence McKenna on culture:
Here’s McKenna giving, one can say, a one sided view of culture, one dealing with the negative aspects……..
His solution is art, and that’s not a bad solution but it needs to be extended. The answer is really “Cultural Creativity”. When people take on culture as software, and run it the way the have been given, like McKenna says “meme sets from Hollywood and Madison Ave” then we run into the problems he was talking about (“the least among us” have seized control of the culture machine). But if people take culture as a library and start writing their own essays, or as a paint shop and start drawing their own signs, then culture is valuable. On the most fundamental level that I can tell, Culture is about Focus. If you have imagination the scope of which our species carries, you have to have some focus. We need culture, but we also need to mark the distinction between culture and the mechanisms of civilization and I don’t hear him do that discrimination too well here, but some good points…..
Ghost Dance Video:
This is a reminder about the decline of a culture…
The book “Something of Value”, comes from a proverb in South Africa, and tells us that “when you take a man’s culture from him, you best give him something of value to replace it.” This clip talks about the importance of having dreamers, but also the importance of a culture that matches. If culture can be equated to an operating system, arguably then, we don’t have a culture that is adapted to our “wet-wear”, most are now out-of-date. Traditional cultures were working well, but the modern one that has been imposed isn’t sustainable. Culture comes out of a long-standing relation to a geo-climatic place and conditions, and that’s what needs to be dealt with.
Tai Chi Spinal Ripple Video
Short and sweet…
Nice, straight, and got low with no strain. Nice spinal ripple….
WuDang Mountain
Culture is carried by us and it’s by choice, so to what degree do we care to take it on…..
Fajing Video
Here's a style that has a good strong FaChing that appears both relaxed and flexibly, fluidly, well rooted
to judge by what I see in some of the more mature artists that I work with, this may be an example of a style most appropriate to male TaiChi artists, and perhaps younger males at that..., there's a certain sort of "shock" energy in some of the FaChings seen in this clip that, I am told, amounts to a kind of "tissue overload" that can be unhealthy for the person releasing the FaChing.
Kung FU Master on a finger…
How about a KungFu Master "standing on one finger"
(I notice that the film doesn't show how he got into that position... )
Magus of Java
For something more distinctly Chi/Qi related, here's an interesting clip
"Dynamo Jack" is the John Chang who is central to the book " The Magus of Java."
Richard Dawkins
Interesting because he is such a proponent of evolution that is a large part of the transcultural project. If we look at culture as a part of the evolutionary process and culture facilitates a fuller realization of species potential…..
Or following McKenna, culture can help honor human potential or not, as the case maybe. Dawkins gives an argument for a very sophisticated cultural person, saying “we make culture for ourselves”.