Five Great Springs of the Body

Materialization is not what most people think it is -- or maybe it is just me. Who knows?

So I was working on a desperate client who had trouble walking on one side, pain in his mid back, opposite shoulder, and could no longer move his neck. I guess that is not so unusual for me. I do get the hard cases -- otherwise someone would crack them in with D.C. after their name. Sometimes you hear a concept over and over and then suddenly it materializes right in front of you. I could see the five springs of the body -- each arm, each leg, and the body itself as being in optimum condition when they bend well. Totally extended or collapsed is a non-working condition. It took me right to the knots. One in the upper fibular bone area, both sides of the mid-back, and finally on the upper thigh of the effected leg. Then reseting a few restricted facets of the neck and he was moving with normal Range of Motion with a normal walk. Tui Na works.

The five great springs of the body can be seen and if you don't see a normal motion then they detect precisely where the defect lies. I like that, a mystery solved. I had him learn tai chi chuan walking so he can make the knees and feet the passive part of his walk long enough for him to recover completely.

I think that most things in life materialize slowly and our understanding unwinds long after our minds have been cluttered up with the information. Mortimer J. Adler said you need to read a book 14 times to understand it. "How to Read a Book" was one of my reads in college but I only read it once and passed by ... I've missed a lifetime of books by that author if you count them up. A 14 year old drop out who discovered reading on the job -- Plato. How great was Plato? Plato wrote down the teachings of Socrates. In college I heard this story of Socrates ... a student asked him if he could help him learn. Plato took him to the ocean and thrust him under the water. At first, the student was compliant. Soon the air was running out and he wanted to breathe. He forced upward but the master held firm. Finally, the student had to breathe and he put all his effort into pushing upward to receive air into his lungs. "When you desire learning like you desire air then you will learn." Now, Adler knew a bit about materialization.

Mortimer died in 2001. His studies in the classics led to a life long quest and a scholarship to Columbia. He eventually became a professor there and was awarded an honorary doctorate for his knowledge of the classics. I think we could all learn a bit from his Common Sense of Politics and his Six Great Ideas. Truth, goodness, and beauty are three ideas we judge by and liberty, equality, and justice are three ideas we act on. Here is his words in an interview:

BILL MOYERS: Six great ideas -- truth, goodness, beauty, liberty, equality, justice. Why these six?

MORTIMER J. ADLER: One answer, Bill, is the Declaration of Independence -- the document that every American should understand -- and five of those six ideas are in the first four lines of the second paragraph. Let me recite those four lines:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they're endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" -- which is the ultimate good -- "That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

There are five of the six ideas, and the sixth is in another great document, Pericles' famous speech at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War in which he was comparing Athenian civilization and culture with the militaristic stale of Sparta, and said, "We Athenians cultivate beauty without effeminacy." -- There's the six of them.

Now, there's a second reason. Three of these ideas -- the first three, truth, goodness and beauty -- are the values by which we judge everything in the universe -- our ideas, our thoughts, human conduct, the world of nature and the world of artistic products. The second three ideas -- liberty, equality and justice -- are the ideas that relate you and me, relate people in society. Their equality, their freedom to relate to one another, their just or unjust treatment of one another -- they are the ideas that govern our actions. They are the ideas by which we evaluate governments and societies and laws.

Unquote -- end of interview.

Mortimer like several other great philosophers of our time became religious in the end. I like to think that the creator materialized in his life. I hope that many other ideas many materialize in all of our lives -- it is our dreams, our imaginations that give us the vision to go beyond the hum drum of daily living. For me, it was five great springs of the body.