2.5 - Intents: Pass, Push, Hold

Warning! The following section contains exercises that may cause property damage. The author is not liable and the reader proceeds at their own risk.

Prerequisites: exercises in 1.4 and throughout chapter 2. In addition, material in 1.3 and 1.5 is referenced.

Recall our discussion of genki's purpose way back in 1.3. Genki travels around the body to both assess its status and deliver messages across the entire system to maintain allostasis, the delicate balance of physical processes that keep us alive and comfortable. Beyond the physical, our genki can communicate with the aura of others to cement emotional bonds, support our body language and even act as a pre-warning system in the event of incoming danger.

The particular set of actions genki undertakes is known as its intent. It is the intent of genki to request information on cells, the intent to project a sense of danger to others, the intent to prepare the body in synchronicity for a fall. These intents are monumentally complex tasks to undertake even if they are simple enough to conceptualise.

If our body is the hardware, one can think of intents as the code, the genki itself as the ones and zeroes rearranged to form the components of our instruction. Like any other task we ask a computer to perform, we do not need to know exactly how it works on a fundamental level for the computer, or our body, to carry it out. I do not need to enervate each individual muscle fibre consciously in my leg to walk, in the same way I do not need to write machine code to create a printable book manuscript (can you imagine?!).

Ki-use, as with any task we can learn when young, will take time to master the components of more complicated tasks. For example, walking - we begin by exercising our legs as babies, crawling and trying to stand, our first few hesitant steps without any of the grace possible to achieve as we age. It is only much later we learn to dance. The human body didn't evolve to partake in seemingly frivolous acrobatic stunts, but we (or some talented individuals, at any rate) can combine basic components of movement to complete amazing feats. This is the same with ki. Modifyin, and even completely hijacking intents our body naturally generates and solidifying them through practice will allow us to later perform more intricate techniques with ease.

The intents discussed in this and the next chapter will, for the most part, be these building blocks. As the more lyrical reader may have observed, these intents have one-syllable names. This is by design. Whilst many complex interactions in the body need to occur to take even one step, the entire process can be summarised as walk. Similarly, wrapping these relatively instinctual intents into one spoken word - and later one thought - reduces the conscious mental load. Even as we progress and string together some component intents, preserving a one-syllable name helps maintain this simplicity.

Of course, you may be wondering why then there are techniques with very complicated names - the Makankousappou comes to mind - but the naming of techniques comes with its own rich history and advantages separate from the intents used to construct them, and I shall address this later (I'll be irritating many technique users by lifting the veil too, but that's for me to worry about!).

The intent of ki can fall under a number of classifications. Active and passive are the main two types. Active intents are obnoxiously running programs - when released they work unconditionally and will happily carry out their instruction without nuance. Push is a perfect example of this, the intent will push whatever it is aimed at. Most intents are active.

A passive intent is an intent in waiting. This could be a framework ready to write a message about the status of the body, an intent waiting for a ki-signature to perform the next intent in an instruction set, or a message in itself, like a general proximity warning to others.

Passive intents are usually strung together with other active or potentially active intents, and a long combination of intents can be referred to as a technique.

In addition, some intents can be friendly or hostile. Friendly intents mean any free ki can be rewritten or added to, e.g. to chain a series of intents between masters or to send messages between ki-users. Pass is necessarily friendly for the receiver to make use of the ki. Push is necessarily hostile to prevent the person on the other end repurposing any remaining genki to counteract the move. An entire technique can be constructed to be conditionally friendly or hostile dependent on who the ki encounters (barriers or landmine techniques are good examples), but this extra step uses up genki that could be otherwise amplified, losing vital power in an attack. In many circumstances this condition is best left, instead asking your family and friends to move out the way.

Anyone who has been at the sharp end of a hurtful or damaging remark will tell you it is the impact, not intent, of an action that truly matters. The same is true of ki. Even with carefully constructed techniques and the purest of intentions behind each intent you will into existence, there is always the chance someone will get hurt. A push intent can be more than a playful shove, a shine intent can blind, a warm intent can burn. Please, please, be careful! Never place yourself in a situation where harming others could be possible. Waving your arms and yelling 'that was not my intention' is too little, too late. Intent does not absolve you of responsibility for your actions. With that in mind, let's look at pass, push and hold.

The first intent we shall work on is the pass intent. Pass is, in effect, a corruption of a natural process. Recall in 1.5 where we discussed the transfer of subconscious messages from one person to another, how we supplement our read of others' body language with a read of their ki? This repackaging to make genki understandable and useable to others is what we shall be modifying in this section.

Beyond reinforcing social signals, why would anyone want to pass ki?

When the chips are down, the enemy coming at you full throttle, and everyone is near their limit, instead of creating a barrage of attacks, the more prudent move may be to to pass your ki to the most experienced individual on the team, letting them take full ownership of intent and deliver one, more powerful blow.

In another situation, someone very much lacking in energy through overexertion may be passed a boost by their comrades (or enemies - see: my father), the caveat being the ki will need careful management lest it fade extremely quickly. One cannot truly invigorate and replenish the centre itself without the assistance of healing magic, but an injection of ki will give the recipient time to rally themselves.

You may be surprised to hear that most people over the age of 25 have used a pass intent - albeit without a clear memory of doing so, nor did they consciously create the intent. In May 774 everyone in the world was asked to raise their hands by Mr Satan. Even though doing so left folk alarmingly exhausted, nearly everyone obliged the bizarre request, and I am eternally grateful for that. By participating you passed your own genki to my father, who then amalgamated and amplified this energy to create a terrifyingly powerful ball-like attack to destroy one demonic and persistent foe. The technique he used is called the genki dama, (spirit bomb), and is exactly that - a push intent formed from genki with a terrifying number of ki signatures.

The real trick behind the technique is not the ball itself but managing the request for genki, sent out as a ripple through the ki-field to all living things, drawing on the shared commonality between ki-users. Now, for plants and many animals, the genki is simply taken until just enough remains for the creature to recover (although I believe this polite safety catch could be removed - our current master of the technique does not wish to try and I don't blame them). For creatures with a cohesive enough sentience to resist the request, permission is given most easily by extending the arms to create a path to draw ki along. The more skilled the genki dama user, the broader the net that can be cast, extending to life forms from many different planets, and combining and amplifying them together in one coherent ball.

Asking for ki from many, many beings is extremely difficult. Giving your genki to one individual is, thankfully, not.

Practising this technique fully will require you to find, for the first time, a willing participant. Unfortunately, they will also need to be a ki-user. For some of you in rural areas or working alone through trepidation or choice, this may be an insurmountable challenge. As a responsible person I cannot encourage you to find practice partners through the internet. I hope I am not being big-headed to envision local classes for this course springing up in time, but for now, if you cannot practice, at least read the theory.

Exercise 2.5.1: Sending Pass

To perform a simple pass, send and concentrate your ki at the end of one limb - the dominant hand or both hands is typical. The genki does not have to be shaped or compressed in any way, only present at the focus. Next, sense your target's ki, and concentrate on the similarities between you. This is tricky, as of course you can only infer your own ki signature, but draw on the commonalities like your humanity, the beat of life and your warmth for one another. This will prime your ki to pass between you, creating an easy-to-catch hook of sorts. Then switch focus to their body to flow your ki towards them.

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This priming may be childsplay if you're friends with the recipient; your ki may already be happily passing between you both in some small measure. If you wish to pass ki to someone you greatly dislike, I congratulate you on showing such compassion, though would ask you to think it through, and remember preserving your own conscience is not more important than the safety of the Universe. To pass across a hostile relationship you need to trick ki into thinking there is warmth between you. Try to envision the pain of their wounds or their broader, helpless situation (Vegeta once noted he drew on his withering pity of others' stupidity to counteract his contempt). The difficulty is finding that empathetic connection to make your ki think its new master is safe, but otherwise the technique is the same.

Exercise 2.5.2: Receiving Pass

As the receiver, you have a job to do, too. Remember pass is a passive technique, and so you will have to accept the ki. This can be as simple as moving your own genki away from your hand to create a dire need for ki - your body will happily snatch up what it can find. You may struggle at first as your body rejects the ki signature on a matter of principle, a useful automatic defence mechanism, but this initial reluctance will fade with practice.

Taking pass will feel odd at first. Trapped within and caught in the flow may be ki already carrying messages, so the bundle will whisper to you. Their genki will be a different colour, texture and taste to your relatively bland own, theirs vibrant so close. There may be a flash of dissociation as your arm looks and feels not your own until your genki mingles with and restrains the foreign ki, but the sensation will settle. If you can control and compress that ki down as well as your own, then you will have mastered pass.

There is an active version of pass, sometimes thought of as rouse, that can be conjured, though as you'd imagine the technique is more advanced. Rouse requires passing ki that will bring round a person from exhaustion-induced unconsciousness by actively feeding them genki until their system restarts.

In this case the intent is modified from the alert mechanism spread through aura. It is that sense of reaching out with the thought to help and to alarm, and supporting that message with the pass intent, that can kick-start your target into taking your ki.

This isn't a healing technique, more an energy boost. Rouse will not mend broken bones or become a replacement for food and water, only restore the bare minimum functionality in allostasis to allow someone to fend for themselves. Please do not take this as permission to let your plants (or worse - pets) go limp so you can attempt a miraculous revival as training. They won't perk up in the way you expect and you will be doing them an injustice.

Push is the next intent we shall attempt and is one of, if not the workhorse intent, particularly in battle. Push is derived from genki's natural instinct to mirror the body's attempt in rejecting foreign genki and blocking objects, however weakly ki naturally interacts with the physical world and therefore futile the body's gesture usually is.

Push is as it sounds - a ball of relentless potential momentum, often directed, that when interacted with will apply a constant force.

Counter-intuitively, the movement of that ball of intent has nothing to do with the force push can apply. Push can be stationary, acting like an area of space rejecting intruders, but more often push will be be chasing down its own effect to keep applying pressure on an enemy, effectively trapping them against a wall of ki. In fact, many aspects of the push intent are counter-intuitive, and to use the intent most effectively one must learn which laws of received physics wisdom are ripe for breaking. In fact, as a biologist, outwitting and upsetting patronising and prescriptivist physicists is a guilty pleasure of mine, so please take to this intent with gusto, if only for me.

If you've even wrestled your way through high school physics you will be aware of the laws of motion. Even if you spent most of the class daydreaming I assure you you'll have heard of these laws through day-to-day cliché, particularly the third.

The first: an object in motion, without any force applied, will stay in motion.

This means a force - a transfer of energy - is required to change an object's direction and/or speed (velocity). A jetcar only slows down when the brakes are applied because of atmospheric drag, or gravitational forces fulfilling their constant threat and slamming the car into the ground. Otherwise, in the simplicity of the vacuum of space, the jetcar will continue on its merry way without the driver having to touch the accelerator.

The second: The acceleration of an object is proportional to both the force applied and the inverse mass of the object.

This means the greater the mass of an object, the more force you'd require to accelerate to match an object of less mass. I am reluctant to say "heavier" or "lighter" here as weight is a manifestation of gravitational forces acting on a mass (and thus you would weigh differently on different planets), but if I do use these words offhand throughout the textbook know I am really referring to your mass or the mass of an object. Physicists can be wonderfully pedantic when it suits them, but I've seen them differentiate with mathematicians watching on in horror, so they really should remember they're in a glass house.

The third is the most famous: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

I told you you would have heard of it. This third law, following from the first two, is the focus of our attention.

Whilst it is true to say you are held down on the Earth's surface by the force exerted by the planet's gravitational field, due to the third law of motion I can also state with equal truth that you're pulling the Earth towards you. In fact, you and the Earth are pulling each other with exactly the same force! But due to the second law of motion - the acceleration being proportional to the force and inverse mass - the Earth's huge mass relative to your own means that you have the greater relative acceleration, resolving to 9.81m/s/s. When you jump the Earth falls back to you, too - just you end up falling far faster.

You might expect then, using ki to push someone back with resounding force would require a truck-load of mass to be hurtling along. Some of you may remember that energy and mass have an equivalence (that ever-famous E=mc^2, where c is the speed of light in a vacuum), and so you may be frantically calculating how much energy you would need to approximate that truck. If so, stop yourself right there (although it's about a millionth of the Sun's per second energy output, in case you were wondering).

Push breaks this third rule rather spectacularly - that is, if you misunderstand the intent.

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If we were sitting next to each other on wheeled chairs and I physically push you with my hands, we would both move away from each other due to recoil, and who moves the most would depend on our relative weights (and sometimes who has the least sticky wheels).

But if I were pushing you with ki, even in the wheeled chairs I'm practised enough that I wouldn't move. Am I holding myself still from the other side with ki? No.

With ki there is no need for recoil. The third law is seemingly violated.

Why?

When I push you with my hand, at a fundamental level the force is caused by an interaction between the atoms in your hand and the atoms in my shoulder, specifically the electrons on the outside of those atoms. I'm drawing a lot on those high-school physics days now, but do you remember electrons are negatively charged, that only opposites attract and thus the same charges repel? When two electrons get close enough to each other they will electromagnetically repel, and that will be by exchanging energy in the form of a photon, light, between them. This electromagnetic repulsion is the basis of a real push in physical space, and as energy is exchanged, both electrons experience a force equal and opposite to each other. If you think about it, 99.99999% of our atoms are empty space. The reason we perceive our bodies as solid is due to electrons interacting in such a way. I find this fascinating, though I know more than one undergraduate has found it disturbing.

(If this process is real, does this mean that light itself can push? Yes! Light exerts a force. This is the logic behind the solar sail, a type of propulsion one can use in space, harvesting a star's light like the wind - though, these sails are not nearly as fast as the drives the galaxy at large currently uses (though more environmentally friendly for sure). On Earth, you can find radiometers - a little windmill inside a vacuum bulb with sails black and absorptive on one side and shiny and reflective on the other that spin in the sunlight. I'll leave it as an exercise to work out why the sails turn.)

When using push however, there aren't two electrons interacting. There is only ki acting on electrons. So whilst the push intent effectively converts ki energy to a photon to impart on an electron, the photon has not originated from an electron in your hand, and thus no electron needs respond in kind. There is no recoil. This means you can throw a truck's-worth of momentum at your friend without batting an eyelid! …Please do not throw a truck's-worth of momentum at your friend, eyelid batted or not.

In practice, there is often some recoil (or the appearance thereof) when throwing a push. This is not due to the third law of motion but rather down to two distinct problems, both of which can be eradicated through training.

The first, improper implementation of push. Push needs a direction and you will have to have laser precision when encoding this. When huge forces are involved, as is often the case when my friends and family are on the defensive for the planet, just 1% of the energy pointing in the wrong direction can cause an unexpected smack in the face, and can really damage your chances. You'll often see ki-users struggling against their own techniques, and spectators having to leave to conserve their strength when even a tiny fraction of push leaks around the main fighter. Being precise to prevent a push in all directions is both safer and more efficient.

One can of course include conditionals on the push - asking ki to ignore friends and the environment to save the planet from such overspills of power. Remember though that these more complicated intents take up genki and so will lessen the overall power of the attack, thus these exceptions are often skipped at crunch moments. I've seen ki-users in this situation use genki to effectively increase their gravitational mass and root them to the ground, but it seems to me that focussing first on improving their directional precision with push would be a better use of their time.

The second emergence of recoil is simply because you expect recoil. Remember that genki carries information about priors around the body (our expectations about the world). Our bodies intuitively understand the third law of motion; we anticipate this law of physics to the point where if a ball hit a wall and fell down dead without a bounce, we would first reassess our assumptions about what the ball and wall were made from well before questioning physics itself. If you are used to recoil in every action you perform you will be anticipating exactly the same behaviour from push and therefore you will use your own energy against you to satisfy this expectation. (This recoil can have its uses, which we will explore later). Overcoming your own wiring is a matter of relearning what contexts to expect recoil and when not to.

Speaking of expectations, I know you all have grand ones about how this next exercise will go. I know you've seen the movies. The would-be-superhero's power awakening, that first unequivocal and unarguable flash of brilliance that proves their destiny is hurtling towards them: the first flame from their hand shooting into the sky, getting hit by a bus and emerging unscathed from the twisted wreckage, the first yell that shatters a wall of windows. Each hero stares in the mirror in wonder and terror, their path in life now clear. A week's practice later they're wearing underwear over tights and all the children are screaming their moniker in excitement.

Those stories are a deterrent against you, the general public, from trying to tread that same path. After all, if the destined had their abilities bestowed by aliens or magic or genetics or a supernatural calamity, and your efforts to mimic them don't lead to the immediate success they had, what's the point in you pouring your efforts into trying to coax out an ability you clearly don't possess?

But the Heroes weaving those dramatic stories are only exhibiting showmanship. They worked just as hard as you will be, and their work started with a single, sometimes breathy and definitely paltry push.

Exercise 2.5.3: Instantaneous Push

As usual settle into a comfortable position, this time with a table or other flat surface at a height you can rest your arm on without straining your back.

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Find a straw, or lightweight, empty drinks bottle or can. You'll need a broad, solid object to catch your very diffuse push, but light and round enough to move easily with the force. I know many of you will want to step up the challenge and try something more impressive, but give yourself a fighting chance this early!

Place the bottle in easy reach of your hand. Do not loom over hoping to see the slightest of movements, otherwise your breath will cause all manner of early excitement. Instead, keep your head up and remember not to hold your breath throughout the exercise. On many occasions Pan has found herself coaching students out of breathing hard on their bottles - their concentration so focussed they could not hear their over-dramatic wheezing flinging the bottle across the table.

Gather genki in one hand or between both, then switch your focus to the side of the bottle nearest you, feeding genki from the hand's focus to the new one, an action similar to pass. In this case really embody that flow like an extension of your own arm, like your fingers are reaching out to this new point. Imagine the build up of pressure and tension on that point. Hold back the urge to push the bottle for as long as possible. Then, when you cannot hold the thoughts coherently any more, imagine releasing all that tension in one shove with this incorporeal hand. Make the movement with your real hand if you have to (although mind the breeze you create).

In a successful attempt the bottle should ever so slightly rock. The roundest and lightest of bottles may even start to roll. Despite the exhausting level of mental energy and attempts this would most likely have taken you, congratulations are still due! However small a wobble, this is your superhero moment. Not be as dramatic as the movies I know, but feel free to be as excited. You can add telekinesis to your list of abilities now.

You may have experienced recoil against your pushing hand, almost a form of haptic feedback so real you may have double-taken thinking you'd actually touched the bottle. For now do not worry about suppressing this, especially as the feeling acts as confirmation that the push did manifest. To train yourself out of the habit, tell yourself you're surprised every time this recoil happens. Eventually, you'll believe yourself.

Exercise 2.5.4: Continuous Pushes

The next step is to chase the bottle with push. You'll need to maintain that flow of genki from your hand to the bottle's focus point, shifting the point as the bottle retreats from you. If performed correctly, the bottle's roll will speed up as your push causes the acceleration (I usually end up moving the focus at a constant, easy to control speed rather than continually accelerating - I wouldn't want to overshoot and push the inside of the bottle too hard, effectively exploding the thing). If you can resist the urge to climb on the table and follow the bottle with your hand then you are doing fantastically well, and have better self-control than many of the people I've taught - although, my students were excitable children for the most part.

Finally, stamina training - pinning the bottle to the wall. This is exactly how it sounds. Push the bottle against the wall to suspend it in midair - as if held with a hand or finger - for as long as you can. This exercise will require a constant flow of genki and, as your natural ability with genki grows, a measured flow of genki not to crush the bottle. If you can lower your outstretched hand but keep up the flow and concentration, you will have mastered this exercise.

(A tip - this time do not focus on the outside of the bottle closest to you, but instead on the inside of the bottle closest to the wall. Take off the bottle's sleeve to view your target if you have to. This will prevent the object from rolling outside your precise push and flinging off into someone's face.)

From there you can stretch the challenge by increasing the weight of the bottle by adding water, or changing the object (avoid water-filled glasses above hospital beds - dad learnt the hard way) or, even tricker, splitting your ki into more than one thread and pinning more objects.

With both practice and genki amplification, push will become one of the greatest assets in your intent arsenal. The intent then is ripe for daily practice.

Hold is our final workhorse intent. No matter your experience, when in battle you cannot maintain perfect concentration on all intents at all times. You need to hold your body together, to fly, to brace for impact, to block, to create and charge attacks. Meanwhile your ki is decaying away moment by moment…

Think about the ki-user's predicament this way: if we know there is a maximum rate at which you can draw on your genki (let's ignore amplification for now) but you know there is a fixed proportion of that genki that will break down per second, then there must be a point at which the rate of decay equals the rate at which genki is summoned. Without any intervention then there is a maximum amount of genki one can have available at one time. So then, how is it possible to charge huge attacks or barriers?

Hold is a way to halt that decay, or to keep an assigned form or intent running without your mind having to constantly rewrite genki. Hold patches up fading intents, spending ki reserves to do so. It will maintain whatever it was told to, for good or for ill. If you tell hold to keep pushing, the intent will use up the rest of the ki reserve in that technique to make that happen. If you need to hold genki in reserve to charge an attack (like the genki dama), hold will do its best to shore up the ki signature and ensure the genki remains programmable.

Used in battle, hold can create landmines or tripwires that can last long after the ki-user who made them has even passed away. My father used hold to great effect once. Trapped underwater with (the non-ki-sensing) Freeza circling above him, he produced two ki-blasts and locked them off with hold, keeping them stable as he swum away, only releasing them upwards when he was clear of any possible retaliatory blasts.

A ball of ki imbued with, say, glow, will only shine as long as it is being commanded, before stuttering and failing as the genki degrades. Add hold to the reservoir and the faint light can last hours - a perfect companion when reading under the blankets late into the night.

Exercise 2.5.5: Hold

To perform hold, go back to the very last exercise. Pin your object to the wall. Now for the new intent. The sensation is a snag in the mind, a pause in breath, a stutter in music, the moment of silence as the waves along the shoreline about turn, the peak of a rollercoaster. That momentary sense of stillness whilst in motion is what you want to harness and pass on.

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Take the threads of push still travelling down your arm to the ki. Tie those threads together in your mind but still grip them like reigns - this act should free your arm of ki flow to the technique. Recall that sense of stillness with hold onto the knot then let go.

If all has gone well, the object will stay stuck to the wall. With practice and amplification you will be able to leave the room completely. Note - this means buckets of water and other vessels of nefarious possibility do not need to be balanced over door frames, only pinned to ceilings.

In future, you may want to keep a thread of focus on the technique to direct its motion, or to add in a break to hold (i.e. hold until triggered in some manner) but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

These three intents are mere examples of the myriad available to you, and form the backbone of many other intents and techniques to come.

In the next section you'll be performing shine to finally see your ki (and to show off to friends) and I have another story I want to tell you to close the chapter - the rest of Saiyaman's true origin story.