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Which would be fine, if.... you could come up with a reason as to why I'm wrong.  Have you done a study showing that qigong demos are real in the way you believe they are?  Because there are plenty - too many, really - studies showing the fallability of the human mind when it perceives something.  And the thing is, by saying that when I grow up I will learn more, you are saying that you know inherently more than I do by simply being older, throwing up an interesting paradox.
  And Richard Dawkins and Penn Jillette haven't grown out of their phases.  Since I like Dawkins' attack dog stance and Penn Jillette as a whole, maybe it's best to retain the childish phase of wanting proof for assertions.

  If you simply mean that qi is the electricity in the nervous system, and that is all, then why designate it qi?  Because qi means breath, and so the confusion is inherent in the word.  The traditional character is a stylised image of steam rising from rice, and the simplified character is just the steam component.  And if it is simply the electrical charge through nerves, then it's nothing important - you can leave the whole qi idea outside the door, and just say "the mind" or "the body" directs action, rather than qi.  And what effect would it have on qigong demonstrations?  Are the feet of qigong demonstrators natural batteries that power their electricity to wherever it wants to go, thereby avoiding all pain and requiring intense concentration?  Because that sounds also quite silly.

"Wu Chi" = wuji, correct?  Wuji, meaning no limits?  This is a purely pre-modern Chinese scientific term referring to the pre-universal state, analogous to the state of the universe as a singularity before the big bang.  I expect there is a system out there called "wuji", but I've not come across it - it is the name of several zhan zhuang poses though, usually just a pose of standing upright with the feet together, like the yoga mountain pose.  And you said before that you studied taijiquan - so I assumed, therefore, that what you were talking of was taijiquan.   You mentioned "wu chi", but you also mentioned nanshaolin wuzuquan, and taijiquan - so, huh?  You practise a style called "wu chi", have I got this right?  And it's an esoteric style taught to some people at a temple that has almost been forgotten.  Right?  Now here's where I have a problem.  You mention a guy named "master chi."  "Chi" could be "ji", "qi", or possibly "chi", all of which have extremely different pronunciations and a multitude of characters, even just the ones used as surnames, and it seems that you use neither Wade-Giles nor pinyin for transliterations, so it's obviously incredibly hard to know the name, and he could even by Cantonese, Hakka, etc, making it ultra difficult.  He apparently taught a system that no one else knows and which he taught in Indonesia - so the lineage is not possible to research independently.  And he boiled water with his hands.  Do you see why I might be somewhat sceptical?  Especially considering the vast number of contradictory statements about qi made by so many people.  If it's breath - and that's the literal Chinese translation - then it's just breath.  If it's the nervous system, then ok, but that's all it is.  Why should having a nervous system give you the ability to boil water?  The only thing it would do is make the control of your muscles that much better by doing qigong, which is the case.  It certainly doesn't give you the ability to put 100 degree celsius temperatures in your hands and boil things without harming yourself.

A diamond push up:  It's where you put your hands together at the thumb and index fingertips so that the gap between them is diamond shaped.  They work the triceps more than regular push ups.  And an extended arm push up is pretty much as you described it, with the hands in front of the head.  As to how many you should be doing until it hurts, unless you have absurdly strong lower back muscles, it should be about ten if you already work out quite a bit.  I have experienced very little in my triceps doing those, but everything in my lower back.  You have to push straight up, not forward and up - your head should remain about a foot from the hands, or as far from the hands as possible.

As for standardisation of forms, this is what you said: Quote:
  Well, that could mean anything.  The standard taijiquan forms of the Drunken Master.  There are no taijiquan forms that are taught to everyone who practises a style of taijiquan, which seemed to be the assumption behind this statement, especially in context.  If you practise Wu YuXiang style taijiquan, then you learn the current standardised Wu style taijiquan long form, and if you study Yang style, then you probably study the Yang Chengfu long form, or even the Zheng ManQing form - but you could also study any of the other Yang family forms.  And a lot of people practise the forms idiosyncratically, adding in fajing movements, sometimes even extra footwork patterns, to suit them.  Unless you have been regimented and told to only ever practise the form as taught, then taijiquan forms are seldom that standardised, and only the 24 and 48 posture forms were designed to be standardised (but they're counterfeit taijiquan.)   All the others are expected to be experimented with, as the people who created them experimented with what they learnt.

  Frankly, I don't get your anger over the issue.  Qi is not proveable or rational - if you wish to convince rather than patronise, then you should try that instead.  The combination of matey statements, lack of proof and a patronising tone get you nowhere when it comes to proving a point, and simply saying that I have to be older so that I can tap into a secret wealth of esoteric knowledge is a little annoying, actually.  Is my mind not able to comprehend the truth of qi that you have, now?

  In any case, it is normally the young who have the bizarre ideas about life and try to be hippies and join communes and laugh at the Man, and who are more likely to believe in qi and prana and fairies.  Get older, get jaded - or at the very least, sceptical.  Why stop such a trend?

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Ummmmmmm....

Yes, I quite agree.  Gods, ghosts and qi are all the same.



And diamond push ups are great.  They are one of my favourites.  I seem to have collected a massive array of push up varieties - 24 or 25 in all, I think - but you only need a couple, and the diamond ones are great.

Have you ever read Pu Songling, loh_kah_hoe - LiaoZhai Zhiyi (Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio)?  I only have it in translation into English, but I think you'd like it anyway.  Full of stories like that.  And weirder ones.  One, which is very, very short (about a paragraph long) is about a man who loves eating snakes.  He once smelt a snake on the other side of a wall, and went around - "he had no knife with him at the time, so he bit into its head and ate it with the tail dangling and wriggling from his mouth."  And that's the whole story.  But there are a lot of fox spirits and dildoes and dragons, and also, interestingly, qigong - in one story, a man concentrates his qi so powerfully that a little man comes out of his ear.  And these wacky tales were all written about three and a half centuries ago.

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Very easily.  Ask most hunters.  That's the reason why north American hunters often have to wear bright orange - deer eyesight cannot see colour, but other humans can, so it doesn't affect the game but it helps hunters not to kill each other.  And accidents still occur.