The body has seven energy centres or vortexes

English speakers who learn Korean will, at some point or another, run into the proverbial sliding glass door. 

 

Being a native English speaker means that, from a very young age, the majority of one’s thoughts (mental narration) have been in English and therefore the thought habits of that mind have molded to fit it. 

In the same way that algae grows on the bark of trees, unable to take any other form than that which the tree has provided, the conceptual connections and habits of an English native’s mind cannot take on any other form than that of the language through which they were encoded.

Ever seen someone walk into a sliding glass door? (lol)
 

All laughs aside, let’s think about why this happens?
 

The person walks and, glancing out the doorway sees a scene that is just as they expected it.
 

When we walk down the street, we glance forward, see a clear path in front of us with no apparent obstructions, and keep walking.

 

In this situation, the person does the same.
 

Doorway.
 

Clear picture of outside.

 

Green light!
 

Walk….. WAM!

All of a sudden, they are all but too aware of their oversight.
 

They made an assumption.
 

With more careful inspection they would have seen the door handle there, or the door frame at least.

 

The proof was there but their expectations blinded them.

So what does this have to do with English speaking Korean learners?

 

The glass door, in this case, is the foundation of thought — the concept of self.
 

When I am with an English speaking friend, as we walk and talk, both of us are keenly aware of this fact:

You are an individual self, and so am I.
 

And this thing we are doing now is an interaction of those two selves.

In this way, English conversations are like ping pong — back and forth from me to you.
 

Well Korean conversations are not really like this.
 

It is much more comparable to say, a game of poker, in which each participant puts their chips in the center of the table.

 

Whereas two English speakers will subconsciously be aware of the two individuals participating in the exchange, Koreans will be much more aware of the fact that something is happening in the center, between those two individuals.

This is accentuated by a linguistic fact about Korean.
 

The grammar forms, verbs, and their conjugations change drastically depending on the nature of the relationship between the speaker and listener.
 

So if I meet a new person, in order to even know how to speak to them, I need to know the way in which they relate to me — Older?
 

Higher professional status?
 

Younger?
 

Lower social status in the group we are both a part of?

 

Social context is king in Korean.

So walking into the glass door. 

 

English speaking learners of Korean walk into the “sliding glass door” when they try to speak Korean in an individual way. 

 

They use the word for “I” far too much and relate everything back to themselves. 

 

When the Korean on the other side of the table tells a story, their instinct is to tell a related story about themselves — “Oh you went to that place? I went there last year!!”— this is not how it’s usually done in Korean (at times, it is, but not nearly to the extent that it is in English). 

 

Unknowingly, and out of lifelong habit, the English speaker starts using Korean as a tool for communicating in the same way that they are used to in English.

If English is founded upon the self, then Korean is founded upon the social context.

Yesterday I was teaching a 1:1 English class to a student, a mid-thirties man who is very much a beginner. 

 

I teach the class in Korean and spent virtually the entire time explaining the same point I’m writing about today, but in the opposite way. 

 

I tell him things like, “English is a selfish language. 

 

The self is the foundation of English thinking… 

 

Objects are usually expressed in terms of the self/ speaker.” 

 

And although he understands, boy is it hard for him to get out of the social context mindset. 

 

For the past few days we have been focusing on three of the most used and confusing verbs in English: have, get, take. 

In every example sentence he asks me about, as I explain I find that the use of these words implies a self. I have. 

 

You get. 

 

She takes. 

 

English’s grammar rules dictate a need for a pronoun — WHO does the thing MUST be specified. 

 

Well Korean does not. 

 

WHO does it is important, but the grammatical need for the pronoun is not there. 

 

It is contextual, understood, and often obvious. 

 

So obvious, in fact, that it need not be even said. 

 

I think this point can be summed up quite well like this:

In English, we have a conversation.

In Korean, there is a conversation.

In fact, one of the most commonly used verbs in Korean, 있다, translates to both have and there is. 

 

The two concepts are merged together! 

 

Another interesting illustration of this is the way that maps in malls or public areas will denote the location of the person using the map. 

 

In the states, it’s “You are here.” In Korea? “현재 위치” = Current Location. 

 

There’s no mention of a self in there, yet there is an implied self. 

 

Yet in English, it’s explicit. 

Massive differences here.

So what’s the point? 

 

If you’re learning Korean, just keep these things in mind. 

 

Pay attention to the way Koreans express certain things. 

 

Try to mimic those ways.

In order to truly speak like a Korean, we must first be able to think like one. 

 

Enjoy the process, friends. 

 

Grow.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/3sic6b/a_completely_different_foundation_of_thought/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body

The body has seven centres, which, in English, could be called Vortexes. These are kind of magnetic centres. 

They revolve at great speed in the healthy body, but when slowed down - well that is just another name for old age, ill-health, and senility. 

The quickest way to regain youth, health, and vitality is to start these energy centres spinning normally again.

There are five simple exercises that will accomplish this.

Any one of them alone is helpful, but all five are required to get the best results.

These five exercises are not really exercises at all. The Lamas call them rites, and so that is how I shall refer to them, too"...  Colonel Bradford 

I wonder if Bradford deliberately avoided mentioning an anti-clockwise direction?

According to  Barbara Ann Brennan, ex NASA research scientist and noted authority on the human energy field, healthy chakras should spin in a clockwise direction - and closed, unbalanced chakras spin in a counter clockwise direction.

In her successful book, "Hands of Light" she says, 

..."When the chakras are functioning normally, each will be "open", spinning clockwise to metabolize the particular energies needed from the universal field. 

A clockwise spin draws energy from the UEF (Universal Energy Field) into the chakra, very much like the right-hand rule in electromagnetism, which states that a changing magnetic field around a wire will induce a current in that wire.

When the chakra spins counter clockwise, the current is flowing outward from the body, thus interfering with metabolism.

In other words, the energies that are needed and that we experience as psychological reality are not flowing into the chakra when it is spinning counter clockwise. We thus label the chakra as "closed" to incoming energies.”...

http://www.t5t.com/articles/The-Five-Tibetans-Rite-No-1-(The-Spin-)-Which-Direction-Should

In 1995, divers noticed a beautiful, strange circular pattern on the seafloor off Japan, and soon after, more circles were discovered nearby. Some likened these formations to "underwater crop circles." The geometric formations mysteriously came and went, and for more than a decade, nobody knew what made them.

Finally, the creator of these remarkable formations was found: a newly discovered species of pufferfish. Further study showed these small pufferfish make the ornate circles to attract mates. Males laboriously flap their fins as they swim along the seafloor, resulting in disrupted sediment and amazing circular patterns. Although the fish are only about 12 centimeters (5 inches) long, the formations they make measure about 2 meters (7 feet) in diameter.

When the circles are finished, females come to inspect them. If they like what they see, they reproduce with the males, said Hiroshi Kawase, the curator of the Coastal Branch of Natural History Museum and Institute in Chiba, Japan. But nobody knows exactly what the females are looking for in these circles or what traits they find desirable, Kawase told LiveScience. 

Pufferfish mating involves females laying eggs in the fine sediments in the center of the circles, and then the males fertilizing them externally. Then, the females vanish, and the males stay for another six days, perhaps to guard the eggs, the study noted. A male pufferfish making a valley in the seafloor with his fins on April 23, 2012.

Males of some species of cichlids (a type of fish) are known to construct crater-shaped mounds that females visit to have their eggs fertilized, Kawase said. For example, male featherfin cichlids in Africa's Lake Tanganyika build small bowls out of the sand, and display them to females before mating there, said Alex Jordan, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin who wasn't involved in this study.

But this new pufferfish's geometric patterns have three features never seen before. First, they involve radially aligned ridges and valleys outside the nest site. Second, the male decorates these ridges with fragments of shells. Third, the male gathers fine sediments to give the resulting formation a distinctive look and coloring, Kawase said. [Photos: Pufferfish Make Seafloor Circles to Mate]

Strangely enough, the male "gathers" the fine sediments using the circular pattern itself, Kawase said. A fluid dynamics test using a half-size model of one of these circles found that the upstream portion of the circle funnels water and fine sediments toward the center. 

 

Then, the downstream peaks and valleys funnel the water outward. The speed of water was slowed by nearly 25 percent in the center, where the eggs are laid, the study noted.

It takes about seven to nine days for the pufferfish to construct the circles. The male pufferfish don't maintain these formations, and underwater currents wash them away relatively quickly. Kawase said they likely give up their old formations because the circles exhaust the fine sediment in the area, and thus must be built anew in areas with fresh sediment.

When Jordan first heard about the circles, he guessed a much bigger fish would have made them. The fact that such a small animal makes such a large formation is "pretty cool, and suggests some underlying biological reason for the size, like poor visibility at depth, or distance between individuals that means males have to make large nests to be found by females," he told LiveScience. 

One of the circular formations in various stages of completion. "A" represents the early stage, B the middle stage and C the final stage. D shows the same circle one week after spawning.

Research describing the pufferfish formations was published in July in the journal Scientific Reports. "It's a nice clean study because it provides a definite answer to the question — something that is very rare in biology," Jordan said.

The formations are very similar to so-called "bowers" — display sites built by various animals like bowerbirds in which to strut their stuff before mating. In this case, the formations may serve solely to gather fine sediments, which females could use to choose their mate, Jordan said.

The fish spends about six weeks building the structure that is 20 times its size, which also acts as a way to slow down the current in order to protect the eggs laid its mate. And the male even adorns the circle with sand dollars and seashells to make it more attractive. Once a female approaches the mating area, it hovers in the center as a signal of approval. The male swims over, snatches the female's cheek and the two creatures begin to mate, however, the process only lasts for a few seconds. Once finished, the female swims off - never to return. The white-spotted pufferfish is about three-inches long and adorned with white spots on its back and silvery white spots on its abdomen. It is the 20th pufferfish to fall into the species of Torquigener – but it is the only one that creates stunning patterns in the sand to attract a mate.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4589618/The-elaborate-mating-rituals-pufferfish-revealed.html

 

But until this idea is tested, nobody will know. "The one caveat I have is that there is no evidence that females care about anything more than the fine sand, and even that's a stretch," Jordan said. "The beautiful lines and structure could serve only to channel those particles to the center, and have no aesthetic purpose."

Although Jordan said he doesn't think that's the case, the idea that the fine sediments are important to females would be "biologically interesting, because it would suggest that function is more important than appearance," he said.


https://www.livescience.com/40132-underwater-mystery-circles.html