Last post, I covered two masters of internal martial arts from the 20th century. There are three kinds of reactions that people have: denial, indecision, or acceptance. I’ve revealed that I’m aboard, and the reasoning that propelled me to that conclusion was founded by a belief in the unknown. But as I sat thinking about it, there is more to it than my belief that the human potential has not been fully tapped. In addition, I believe that we can use the human imagination as contrasted with reality. It’s true that super-heroes and supernatural stories are usually relegated to the literature of children, but there is an undeniable connection between the imagination and the reality that surrounds us. Someone had to envision a particle accelerator, really imagine the thing, before one was created. This is a tricky process because that means that the imagination is dependent on the reality that it encounters. In other words, you couldn’t just jump from the stone age to the nuclear age … or could you? Is technology dependent on single-file, chronological, easily trackable, evolutionary type steps? Or can you have sudden spurts of evolution? Can you skip ahead in the evolutionary cycle without leaving a trace of it behind?

The thought that predominates our Western perspective of history is that we are the culmination of all human civilization that came before us. We are the most technologically advanced, the most evolved, the prettiest, the smartest, and the most dominant of the space that we inhabit. This gives a very tidy (and incredibly anthropocentric) view of our species today. But there are some troubling relics out there that challenge that view. The first, which was hotly debated but has been recently reconstructed, is the Antikythera machine.

Those that are familiar with the Antikythera machine are probably familiar with the content in this article by Live Science. The origins of the machine are interesting as well and suggest that there may have been more than one of these little devices. In 1900, divers off the coast of the little island of Antikythera found the device inside of an ancient cargo shipwreck in fragments. The picture here shows all of the fragments that the divers brought to the surface, and researchers from around the world have been reconstructing for over a century. Modern technology has helped in the analysis of the pieces as well, though some of the parts are hypothetical. If you read the article, then you know that the machine functions as a very accurate astronomical calculator that could even predict eclipses and trace star patterns. The article also describes the device as, “a clock-like machine consisting of more than 30 precise, hand-cut bronze gears, [which] show it to be more advanced than previously thought—so much so that nothing comparable was built for another thousand years.” This means that the culture that created this device was capable of a metallurgy that far proceeded any culture ahead of it for a millennium.  It is even possible that this device wasn’t even the most advanced machine that those people built, but the most advanced machine from them that we’ve found. Another machine that creates a great amount of skepticism is the Baghdad battery.

Many people have heard about these batteries, but I’ll elaborate a little. Here is an article that provides the information I will paraphrase. The battery works off of gathering electrons from acidic liquids by using different metals (pardon the simplicity of this explanation) and can generate up to two volts of electricity. These batteries could hypothetically be used together, but there is no real explanation for how they were used. There are a lot of theories, but the reality is that we may just not understand the “wiring” of the day because we are expecting them to look like something that we would use today. The important part is that two thousand years ago, someone came up with a concept that would lie dormant until a century or two ago. They came up with technology out of a sync with the rest of the world. This means that some societies and some cultures were really dominant in areas of technology that did not last or were buried under the banner of war, disease, or some other decline of a civilization. This also paints a picture that perhaps we are not as much at the height of all civilization before us. At the end of the BBC article, they mention the last machine that I’ll look at before getting back to the connection with super-heroes or the supernatural: Hero’s engine.

First, no one has any idea what this could have been used for, or if it was even used for any other purpose. Many physics classes use these devices to talk about thermodynamics. The device is named after Hero of Alexandria, but it is unclear if he devised the machine himself or whether his disciples devised it after his passing. Essentially, fire is applied to a kettle that is full of water, the water turns to steam which escapes through two tubes that are bent in opposite directions. When the steam pressure builds, the force of the escaping steam turns the machine. Sound simple? It gets interesting if you add a pole to the bottom of the machine and then attack a simple gear that could turn another gear on an axle. There you would have a two-thousand year old steam engine. Yet another instance of a technology that was developed thousands of years ago but that we credit ourselves with the “correct” application. Ultimately, these technologies paint a picture of technological progress that is not uniform and certainly not necessarily progressive in the kind of sense that we like to envision it. If we start to think that maybe some peoples were incredibly advanced in some aspects of their civilizations while maybe not very advanced in others, we get a picture of a landscape that houses thousands of possibilities; once again, we can maybe understand a bubble of evolution: spasms of development and progress in the unraveling of time that stand alone and unexplainable to us except as fancies of the imagination. But reminders of our inferiority are out there foiling our smug hubris.

What does this have to do with martial arts and specifically those two martial artists? Maybe nothing. I’m willing to concede that, but maybe, just as we’ve seen physical technologies that developed ahead of the curve, certain civilizations developed internal-technologies that were far ahead of our time.  So let’s see where our super-men are at. Here’s some of the craziest acts of strength I found:

This video is impressive because the guy is not that large, and he is able to use his strength multiple times. Check this one out:

Now here comes an interesting video. Most people think that Tank Abbot is a bad-ass, and I don’t doubt that he is, but he can only bench the same amount of weight as the guy above only once. Here’s the proof:

Now check out this interesting little clip. This guy has some incredible control of his body.

This next video shows another expression of strength. It is truly amazing.

Take this video as an example, and I fear that I’m going to have to do one more part on this to get a little more in-depth, but this video shows an indication of how chi could be used in conjunction with hypnosis. This would also explain some of Ueshiba’s video. Here it is: judge for yourselves.

And finally, here is a real fighter. I have nothing but positive things to say about this guy, and I don’t even know if he’s to blame or not, but he can certainly walk the talk.

This guy knocks a bunch of people out with seeming ease. Granted, they’re not level 3 Spartans (Halo reference [I think I got that right]), but imagine what Ueshiba and Cheng Man Ching may have been able to accomplish by using a technology that was thousands of years old but completely effective today as it was back then. Perhaps these men were just more evolved in some sense or were able to utilize a cognitive technology that enabled them to tap into an energy that most of us can’t see. See you next week.