NeiKung Masters Powers

[VegasNick]

i posted this here cause this has to do with science imo this might seem impossible to most but please keep a open mind..haveing said that i thought id share a video that shows a indonesian mans chi powers that he claims he achieved with medetation.....judge for yourself there is also a book writen about this man called The Magus of Java writen by a well known physicist http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77nD5xmL0kU

[yukoncpa]

What a cool video. I'd like to see some scientists hook up some electrical equipment to his body to measure these impulses. But I have to say, unless this was staged, it was pretty cool.

edit - something like this is immensely testable. Anyone should be able to approach this man with equipment and test the electical impulses.

[VegasNick]

[ QUOTE ]
What a cool video. I'd like to see some scientists hook up some electrical equipment to his body to measure these impulses. But I have to say, unless this was staged, it was pretty cool.

[/ QUOTE ] actually there is a video that was recently made where he does do some of his demonstrations infront of a 4 person group of doctors and Scientists.. and also the book that i listed above was a 1 year time period that a physicist Kosta Danaos spent with him documenting his first hand expierience with john and did a series of tests which he was sure would uncover this man as a fraud but..he ended up a 100 percent beliver and student of johns

[VegasNick]

for those who have saw the first video and are still interested about this guy here is a more recent video of him ...the first one was taken around the late 80s this one was taken between 2005 and 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aos0hnwiHt8

[The Ice Ceam Man]

wow thats awsome...id hate to piss him off hed set my ass on fire

[joes28]

nm already posted.

[yukoncpa]

I watched the second video and wasn't impressed. The straw through the table, is a standard magic trick. I can push a straw through a potato. He didn't measure any electrical impulses on the equipment that tested him. I call the whole thing fake.

[VegasNick]

[ QUOTE ]
I watched the second video and wasn't impressed. The straw through the table, is a standard magic trick. I can push a straw through a potato. He didn't measure any electrical impulses on the equipment that tested him. I call the whole thing fake.

[/ QUOTE ] but what about the light bulb thing...and the part where he shocked the doctor when his hand was on his stomach...again i am not trying to say im not a skeptic cause i am...but how was that done?

[yukoncpa]

[ QUOTE ]
but what about the light bulb thing...and the part where he shocked the doctor when his hand was on his stomach...again i am not trying to say im not a skeptic cause i am...but how was that done?

Post Extras


[/ QUOTE ]
I’ll admit I was impressed, and truly, I love this sort of thing, but honestly, when I saw the straw trick, well, I’ve seen that trick many times before. So I have to say, that based on that, I am a skeptic on the other phenomena. I’ll let others more qualified than I am to comment on the light thing etc.

[TheBellagioKid]

i agree exept it was a chopstick not a straw but ya the chopstick thing was kinda odd

[VegasNick]

ya im not sure why he did that straw demonstration lol but i cant decide the whole thing is fake judgeing by that alone

[yukoncpa]

[ QUOTE ]
ya im not sure why he did that straw demonstration lol but i cant decide the whole thing is fake judgeing by that alone


[/ QUOTE ]

Hi,
I'm not saying the whole thing is a fake on that alone, and i'm sorry to hijack your interesting thread. All I'm saying is that I have seen that one trick many times, and indeed the trick has been explained to me. So why put this trick in his video?

[VegasNick]

ya i agree with you yukon that chop stick thing striked me as quite odd

[samsonite2100]

I would be willing to bet that if he was put in a rigorously controlled scientific setting, he wouldn't be able to reproduce these results.

Or more to the point, I'd be willing to bet he wouldn't be willing to be tested in a rigorously controlled scientific setting.

[SNOWBALL]

The newspaper thing and the LED thing are impressive. The shocks people felt are NOT.

Derren brown can do something similar:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBXXA5xhcQ0
it's like halfway through the vid

[vhawk01]

Weird. Is this just some hyper-suggestive state thing, or what is going on, exactly? Specifically the psychic thing, but the one-inch punch seems similar.

[vhawk01]

Actually, the one-inch punch is really just a matter of pushing a guy pretty hard near his center of mass and knocking him over. Like how you can hold someone in a chair by placing a single finger on their forehead.

[SNOWBALL]

[ QUOTE ]

Actually, the one-inch punch is really just a matter of pushing a guy pretty hard near his center of mass and knocking him over. Like how you can hold someone in a chair by placing a single finger on their forehead.



[/ QUOTE ]

yeah afaik, the one inch punch isn't fake. Bruce lee could break at least one board with it.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Actually, the one-inch punch is really just a matter of pushing a guy pretty hard near his center of mass and knocking him over. Like how you can hold someone in a chair by placing a single finger on their forehead.



[/ QUOTE ]

yeah afaik, the one inch punch isn't fake. Bruce lee could break at least one board with it.

[/ QUOTE ]

I wasn't implying it was fake, merely that it wasn't mystical. Still plenty awesome.

[SNOWBALL]

can ANYONE come up with ANY explanation with the LED and newspaper stuff?

[samsonite2100]

He had electrical discharge equipment (sorry, not an electrician, obv.) hooked up to his body under his clothes?

[MegaloMialo]

I will start meditating now. In 10 years i shall be the king of earth.

[bunny]

[ QUOTE ]
can ANYONE come up with ANY explanation with the LED and newspaper stuff?

[/ QUOTE ]
Both are standard magic tricks. The newspaper wasnt even very impressive imo - you can make a much bigger deal of showing the newspaper is empty than they did on the video.

He just looks like another uri geller to me. Can't explain the "electrical" shocks which dont show up on a voltmeter, but I havent felt them either. The rest were off-the-shelf tricks you can buy through mail order.

[samsonite2100]

Yeah, not to burst anyone's bubble, but there are a lot of these guys in southeast asia and the indian subcontinent. Faith healers/wizards/mystical gurus like this are about a dime a dozen in these parts. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see him tested at MIT, but as I said, I doubt he'd go for it.

[latefordinner]

Empiricists forget that acupuncture IS a system which has been derived through making hypotheses and testing them over and over again - not possible to evaluate the "reality" of the claims in this video, but Chinese medicine, while it has a very different conception of the body than Western medicine, has been developed over thousands of years with rigorous testing of different hypotheses.

[VegasNick]

i agree with latefordinner....this may seem humanly impossible here in the west but in the east...they have a completely diffrent view of medicine and sure i would like nothing beter but to see this dude tested at MIT or other controlled settings...but its hard for me to say its fake based on the fact that there are magicians that can do the same

[MegaloMialo]

Seriously, this is fake right?

[VegasNick]

[ QUOTE ]
Seriously, this is fake right?

[/ QUOTE ] none of us here can say for 100 percent certain rather its fake or not me on the other hand haveing read the book about this..and studied eastern philosophy i happen to think its real

[The once and future king]

In Chinese hospitals acupuncture is standard. Open heart surgery with only acupuncture for the pain is a common procedure.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
Empiricists forget that acupuncture IS a system which has been derived through making hypotheses and testing them over and over again - not possible to evaluate the "reality" of the claims in this video, but Chinese medicine, while it has a very different conception of the body than Western medicine, has been developed over thousands of years with rigorous testing of different hypotheses.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yep, acupuncture has been demonstrated to be efficacious for treating some things (mostly back pain, neuralgia, and similar things) and so has chiropracty. I don't have much problem with these alternative modalities, as long as they are used for the things they have been demonstrated to work for. Of course, acupuncture being effective does NOTHING to imply that laying on hands and Reiki are legitimate, and I'm fairly certain neither of them have ever been demonstrated so.

Careful with your assertion that these methods have been developed over thousands of years of 'rigorous' testing. The idea is that it would be hard for some treatment to survive that long solely based on placebo effect and wishful thinking...but it isn't impossible. There are MANY old wives' tales that stick with us to this day, that have been around for hundreds and even thousands of years. They have stuck around based on confirmation bias and placebo effects. I try my best not to be close-minded with regard to any sort of medical treatment, but the double-blind randomly controlled trial does not depend on any specific Western model of medicine. It applies equally well to an Eastern model, or any model, and if you want your treatments to be taken seriously, it is a simple thing to subject them to ACTUALLY rigorous testing, via double-blind RCTs. Acupuncture and chiropracty have done this, and been shown effective for some things, useless for others. Crystal therapy, homeopathy and various other Eastern treatments have either never been subjected to rigorous testing or have failed testing.

BTW, there are standard Western medical practices that would almost certainly fail to demonstrate benefit if subjected to RCT. This is just as disturbing to me as homeopathy, in fact moreso because these practices tend to be accepted without question and widely used.

[SNOWBALL]

[ QUOTE ]

BTW, there are standard Western medical practices that would almost certainly fail to demonstrate benefit if subjected to RCT. This is just as disturbing to me as homeopathy, in fact moreso because these practices tend to be accepted without question and widely used.


[/ QUOTE ]

Besides something obvious like circumcision, I can't think of any. Name some?

[latefordinner]

Snowball:

The jury is still somewhat out on SSRIs in relationship to depression for example, especially certain types of depression. Much research is still somewhat contradictory. Same with Ritalin. While it's clear that both SSRIs and amphetamine-like compounds are statistically significant in reducing some symptoms, there is contradictory evidence from double-blind studies over the entire range of symptom profiles they are prescribed for.

http://www.srmhp.org/0201/media-watch.html

Evidence is also out on diet/nutrition as far as they relate to certain risk factors

--

I'm not as much concerned with common WM techniques not being proven to work as I am with the possible iatrogenic effects of many of them.

--

VHawk: I also think we could have a lively discussion about medicine/context - that is if it is possible for a type of medicine to work in one cultural context and fail a double-blind study in another context.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

BTW, there are standard Western medical practices that would almost certainly fail to demonstrate benefit if subjected to RCT. This is just as disturbing to me as homeopathy, in fact moreso because these practices tend to be accepted without question and widely used.


[/ QUOTE ]

Besides something obvious like circumcision, I can't think of any. Name some?

[/ QUOTE ]

X-rays as diagnostic for lung cancer is a commonly discussed one. There have been studies done recently, I think, that show no improvement in outcomes for x-ray screening, yet this was standard procedure and assumed effective without support for decades. A large minority of surgical procedures are done with no support in the literature for their efficacy. Its likely that most of these ARE beneficial, but they haven't been demonstrated to be so, and some small number of them are very likely non-beneficial. Yet they continue to be done.

The shift to evidence-based medicine is a fairly recent one, even in the United States, and there is plenty of holdover from the older way of doing things.

Circumcision, while a hot-button issue in some circles, at least HAS a lot of research and data, on both sides. The issues I'm talking about have generally never been studied, or were studied for the first time after decades of use and found to be useless.

[Metric]

Magic trick = cheap entertainment

Magic trick + explanation in terms of "chi" = serious SMP discussion?

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
VHawk: I also think we could have a lively discussion about medicine/context - that is if it is possible for a type of medicine to work in one cultural context and fail a double-blind study in another context.

[/ QUOTE ]

We probably could. I will admit my bias upfront, and say that I think the idea of a treatment working in one cultural context and not another is extremely strong evidence of placebo effect and placebo effect only. Of course there are cultural differences in compliance and risk factors, but these can be corrected for in double-blind studies. I see no fundamental reason why homeopathy is diametrically opposed to RCTs, and the same goes for crystal healing, energy healing, Reiki, prayer and a host of other alternative theories. My anti-alternative theory bias has nothing to do with the 'hippie, touchy-feely anti-establishment' aspect of the treatments, and everything to do with the consistent refusal to subject their treatments to controlled experiments, and the failure of those modalities every single time they ARE examined experimentally.

IOW, I think it is thousands of times more likely that the practitioners know they don't really do anything than that there is some key component that is resistent to objective observation. It is still POSSIBLE that this is the case, but extremely unlikely, IMO. Just look at how quick the acupuncture and chiropracty people are to jump on RCTs and other studies that show measurable benefits to their treatments for back pain, etc. They love scientific rigor then!

[bunny]

[ QUOTE ]
i agree with latefordinner....this may seem humanly impossible here in the west but in the east...they have a completely diffrent view of medicine and sure i would like nothing beter but to see this dude tested at MIT or other controlled settings...but its hard for me to say its fake based on the fact that there are magicians that can do the same

[/ QUOTE ]
I dont think it's a fake because there are magicians that can do the same. I think it's a fake because it seems the best answer to the question "How come this guy demonstrated his powers by reproducing a whole bunch of effects you can buy from a magic shop?"

In other words, it seems unlikely to me that the mystic powers he has just happen to correlate with the magic tricks that you can buy. (I confess I havent seen the electric shock trick in a catalog - I put that down to my lack of encyclopedic knowledge of purchaseable magic tricks).