Chapter 204: Discovering a New Way to Project Ki

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 (Continued)

During the morning I carried out several ki experiments, building on the almost successful "Make Someone Fall Down Without Touching Them" technique from last evening with Sensei. Having so many people gather around me at school was a pain, but it did provide me with plenty of 'volunteers'. Most of my volunteers were girls, as they were the ones who were reaching out to touch me the most. I wasn't doing anything harmful to them, so girls were just as good as guys for most of what I did.

I soon confirmed that I could 'reel someone in' fairly easily. If someone was reaching for my hand, I could make them grab toward me faster than they expected. I was grasping their ki with mine and projecting mine farther in the direction they were moving, pushing their ki farther away from them, but in a direction that resulted in an effect that was indistinguishable from my towing them faster toward me.

Ki is always projected and never sucked. As an experiment I tried sucking my or someone else's ki, but it just doesn't work that way. It's an energy I can tap from the Universe (somehow?), then radiate. I don't know what the mechanism for it is, other than it requires that I'm centered to be able to 'see' it with my proximity sense or use the very weird ki abilities I have: NP and blobs. Intention Ki, which everyone has, just seems to be something that we all project away from ourselves. I could have an equally unknown mechanism for sucking it in, but somehow that doesn't feel possible. A metaphor I had was an extension of Sensei's "jet of water". If I was a dam on a river, I could open a small floodgate to let water jet out of me in a particular direction, but I (as a dam) couldn't do anything to make the water go in the other direction. I had a feeling that there was a pool of energy in the Universe, flowing all over the place (and that's what I thought "moving in harmony with the Universe" meant moving in sympathy with, even though I couldn't sense that flow). I could tap into it, and redirect it out of me, but reversing the flow wasn't going to happen. Imagine opening a dam's floodgate and trying to empty a bucket of water back into the lake behind it! This metaphor felt reasonable, but it was still far more a figment of my imagination than based on much in the way of facts.

[[It's not a great metaphor, but it captures some aspects fairly well and is useful enough for now. Later on I find a way of reversing the flow, an effect I also name after Ava, although not for a reason as happy as the inspiration of "Nipple Power".]]

The next obvious experiment was to 'tow' their ki in the wrong direction. When next someone tried to reach for my hand (I'd be holding it out a little, to make it an easy grab or touch for girls), I overlapped their ki with mine, then projected mine at ninety degrees to their intended movement. It made logical sense that their hand should be towed off target, but I was still delighted when it happened exactly that way. That seemed far more interesting and useful than accelerating them toward me. It had one major limiting factor though, as soon as they noticed that they were missing their target, they adjusted their aim. It still worked a little, but it was best when someone wasn't watching their movement, such as when they were looking me in the face while reaching for my arm.

If next time someone tried to stab me with a pair of emasculating scissors, by using the sideways "ki-tow" I'll be able to deflect them off target. How much effect I could get in such a violent situation was yet to be discovered, but I thought probably only an inch or two. I guessed people stab with something like fifty pounds of force, plus there's a lot of momentum and inertia involved, so vectoring their angle of thrust to the side wasn't going to have much effect. My ki is several times stronger than an untrained person's, but it's not strong enough to tow a violently thrusting arm wildly off target. I might get a better result by using a sideways NP-push, even though that was only a paltry 10.5 pounds.

However, a ki-tow would be better than using NP in two interrelated respects. The attacker would feel an NP-push on their hand, so they'd correctly think something freaky was going on, which might cause me trouble when they talked about it later. Second, their natural reaction - if not to scream and run away - would be to immediately push against the force to correct its effect. A ki-tow is undetectable because I'm effectively redirecting their intention, which their hand then follows. It is detectable when they see that their hand is off target, but they'll just assume they missed for some reason.

In my Aikido training, I'd nearly always been told to project my ki from my hands or wrist. Very occasionally from my elbow or center, but there was almost never a need to project ki from anywhere else. So it was a strange feeling to try to project ki from other parts of my body. When someone was in the process of slapping me on the shoulder from behind, I tried to project ki from the area they were about to slap, so as to overlap with their ki, out through the front of my shoulder, to tow them into a harder slap. I didn't project ki out of strange places as well as I did out of my hands, so I started practicing the projection part of the technique, without waiting for a 'volunteer'.

Projecting ki worked reasonably well out of 'corners' of my body: my elbows, the ends of my shoulders, top of my head, etc. As if the 'corner' represented the end of the hose the metaphorical water was jetting out of. I tried projecting from a nipple, and that was almost as good as a 'corner', so "Nipple Power" wasn't totally misnamed. Projecting ki from a non-corner, such as the middle of my chest, was noticeably 'poorer' (by which I mean less ki was radiated, and it tended to spray out wider rather than in the focused stream I wanted). It was even poorer still when I tried to project it from the middle of my chest at an odd angle, so it started in the center of my chest, but traveled inward through my body and emerged out of my left buttock, for example. Unexpectedly, projecting ki from my center wasn't easy in any direction. I'd thought there was something special about the center, so it might've been able to project ki well, but that wasn't the case.

The "Corner Effect" seemed far more likely to be psychological than real, so I practiced hard for most of a class, trying several approaches including all sorts of hose imagery. I did improve somewhat, but from practice rather than finding an image that worked. Despite my improvement, I still couldn't get non-corners to produce as much ki, or ki that was as well-focused, as from corners.

Toward the end of class, I hit upon something that worked well. I'd been imagining variations of a hose running from my center, the presumed source of my ki [[wrong]], to the point I wanted my ki to start radiating from. I'd been using the middle of my left shoulder blade as the ki's starting point, with it emerging out the middle of my chest. I tried having the hose running out of my body in an exterior loop until it pointed at my shoulder blade, like a large "C". Or running purely within my body, other than the minimum protrusion it needed to be able to squirt inward from outside of my shoulder blade, although that required a sharp bend in the hose. Neither of those, nor every other variation that I could think of (wide or narrow hoses, for example) produced good quality ki streams. I was mentally trying to think of images that might get rid of the problem of the hose having a sharp bend at its end, while still having the 'water' flow in the right direction. I tried to avoid the sharp bend by having the hose squirting along the skin on my back, with an angled deflector redirecting the ki inward and through my body.

We were discussing where to place the deflector: immediately in front of the end of the hose, a couple of inches in front, have the end of the hose sliced at an angle with the longest part on the outside, from which the deflector extended, etc. During this discussion one of my minds created a mental image of a hand, with an index finger pointing to show us where he thought the deflector should be, and then he moved the finger to point in the direction he wanted the deflector to direct the water. Something about that image felt right to the owner, so he immediately tried to direct ki from the index finger, and it flowed very nicely in exactly the direction he was pointing.

I threw the imaginary hose away, to play around with an imaginary pointing finger, which immediately proved to be an excellent mental crutch (that surely being what all the imagery was). That image was more flexible because it could be located anywhere and point in any direction. It was also very familiar and intuitive. I could easily imagine my hand behind my back, with a finger extended, pointing at my shoulder blade in a direction toward the middle of my chest. It was actually easier to imagine than to do for real, as real arms aren't that flexible. I didn't have to imagine the whole arm, just the hand with its extended finger. With a little practice, I made it even easier just by imagining the last couple of inches of a finger. We look at our fingers most of our lives, so we're VERY familiar with what they look like. Imagining ki projecting from my finger was very easy, and the whole thing worked fantastically well.

I realized why 'corners' were easier to project ki from. It was because I'm used to pointing with corners. If your hands are full, you sometimes point with your head, elbow, or shoulder. Even pointing with a nipple was intuitively obvious enough that it made projecting ki from one easy. Whereas I found projecting ki from a calf muscle difficult. Pointing with, and projecting ki from, fingers was perfect. I could even imagine a finger inside my calf muscle, pointing and projecting in the right direction. I wasn't projecting ki from odd parts of my body; I was projecting it from an imaginary finger, located and oriented however I wanted.

Which created a VERY interesting question: could I imagine a finger separate from my body, and project ki from it?

I imagined a finger a foot or so in front of me, pointing sideways. Then I turned on the faucet, and I could see the ki flow sideways in front of me.

I was so excited at the flexibility of this new discovery that the teacher asked me if I was all right.

"Sorry, I just solved a tricky mental problem I've been working on. Nothing to do with your class, sorry. Just pretend I'm not here."

"As you're pretending about me, haha." (The humor because I got very good grades in her class, so she was happy with me.) She returned to her lesson, I returned to my experiments.

I wondered how flexible it was. It was trivially easy to imagine a pointing finger, even one not connected to my body. With a few minutes practice, it got even easier and more effective at projecting a great flow of ki. I could easily imagine a disembodied hand floating anywhere in the room, oriented so its index finger pointed in any direction I wanted. I had a small experimental problem though, as I can only see ki if it's within three feet of my center. I could see ki extending from an imaginary finger a few inches in front of me, but if I moved it six feet away, I couldn't distinguish whether it was: (a) projecting ki that I couldn't see, or (b) not projecting ki at all.

Someone standing four feet away from me, projecting ki toward me, e.g., if they're about to start running to me to give me a hug, has their ki become visible at the three-foot mark. So I imagined a finger just out of the three-foot range and had it project ki back toward me. No ki appeared. It wasn't definitive proof, but I was reasonably sure that no ki was being created.

^

[Let me digress in tidying up a few possible misunderstandings, and giving you a better understanding of ki:

The imagined fingers are literally only "imagined", exactly as you would imagine them. They are not physically created in any way - not like NP-fingertips - so they're nothing to do with ki themselves. The ki I can project from them is real ki, but not the fingers themselves are in no sense real. Those fingers serve only as a mental crutch for me, giving me something to focus on that defines the location and direction of the ki I want to create, as well as being something that I am used to projecting a direction from (that's what "pointing" is), thereby making projecting ki from them even easier. I always knew they were nothing but a visualization aid, which is why I so quickly reduced them to a finger, and didn't hesitate to scale them up or down if I wanted a wide or narrow flow of ki.

The second misunderstanding you might have is over the nature of the ki I was projecting. It is "Intention Ki". It is not a physical force in any sense. Blobs radiate electromagnetically, NP-fingertips apply mechanical force. For all I know I could create gravity and the two nuclear forces too, although I'm sure they'd be undetectably weak. Intention Ki is none of these forces; it's a Conscious effect only. My other abilities affect the Universe's Matter or Energy; intention affects only the Universe's Consciousness, which interacts with our minds, so has a small effect on them, as previously described.

As a slight additional digression, I wrote that "blobs radiate electromagnetically." Electricity is also electromagnetic, so theoretically it might've been possible for me to create it. Normal ways of creating it include lightning, by chemical reaction, or with an electric generator, none of which I could reproduce with my meager abilities.]

[[Humanity currently understands there to be four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear. Mechanical force is not a fundamental force, as it's created from the fundamental forces, nearly always from electromagnetic. At this time in my autobiography, I had naively assumed NP was a mechanical force, without thinking about it deeply enough. Had I done so, I would've realized that mechanical forces (friction, tension, etc.) occur where atoms interact electromagnetically, but NP-fingertips are massless so they clearly don't contain atoms. This should have immediately created the question, "How on Earth do NP-fingertips manage to exert a mechanical force then?"