Why would anyone, repelled by the mere idea of violence, study martial art as a path to health and spiritual peace? Because the more profound your martial chi, the more powerfully you may love and heal. Symmetrically, the more ethical or loving the martial power, the more irresistible its domination.
Martial chi isn't merely a destructive power. It's even more vitally a healing agent, enhancing and motivating your immune system, emanating from you to heal the energy states of your environment and its inhabitants.
The most malignant enemy to your general health as well as your most vital ally resides inside you, and the dark wins by default when you don't train and empower the inner warrior. As an example, a patient who visualizes ferocious or martial images overpowering and routing malignant cells is more successful in managing his illness. The more powerful and hawkish the metaphoric imagery, the better the immune system responds.
A martial artist doesn't conquer outer space as much as he integrates it with the world he discovers inside himself, growing more virtuous as he becomes less fearful. Virtue, exemplified by the golden rule (do unto others because there is no other, there's only unity) is a prerequisite to mastery. Virtue leads to the holographic realization that you are a synergistic multitude of one. A proper martial artist discovers the highest spiritual point of his inner world, identifies with that, and extends it outward as a force that may be identified as healthy love.
Love and martial art seem incompatible, but what are really incompatible are love and fear, because you cannot love someone at the same time that you fear him. Other empathetic emotions may be possible toward one that you fear, but not love. A martial "artist" engages and subdues his fear, and by reducing fear, increases the capacity to love. Saul Krotki defined martial mastery as the ability to handle an opponent in the affectionate manner one would assume towards one's child. This definition of mastery seems to be very similar to the call to love your enemy (opponent) in a manner comparable to the way you love yourself.
A martial artist may have enemies, as most people do, but a high level martial artist probably doesn't fear them because he's confident that he can defend himself against them and he sees how flimsy the border separating him from others is. Logically, therefore (and maybe ironically), a martial artist who doesn't fear his enemy may be in a better position to follow the powerful edict to "love your enemy" than a mere pacifist is.
"The tai chi form is a library of techniques passed through the generations. Every move or frame in the form sequence was devised as part of a blueprint of defensive or martial applications.
Some applications are the product of a single form constituent or lesson and some applications are the result of a scheme that encompasses several sets of movement.
But if you practice a form without adhering to the literal, or practical applications of the form, then the intent of the originators and the chi that went into it is compromised.
The internal nature of the art places chi energy at the heart of such martial expressions, and so, by changing the form in disregard for the combative intent, the health and energetic venefits are diluted."
Thought, learning, creativity, emotion, movement and intelligence function to coordinate mind, body and environment into a coherent web. Martial artistic expression, the product of integration of body, mind and emotion, develops skills or intelligences that are available for other purposes as general intelligence, or holographic mentality, accessible from many different places including many that are unconscious. Aikitaiji systematically warms up the intelligences, beginning with the oldest parts of the brain, alerting all learning systems; making them attentive to (and ready for) new learning. This workout systematically tracks the evolution of movement, warming up each level or type of sensing and knowing, from the ancient reptilian life- function (floor work), to the social mammalian in relationship here and now (bi- pedal work), to future high level spiritual consciousness (chi work).
The history of martial art follows an analogous evolutionary path. Chinese martial art came from India with a yogi who wanted to help some poor monks who were victims of bad health and crime. First he taught them floor work symbolic of the stage of infancy- static postures from Hatha Yoga which built their bodies' core strength necessary to get up, stand and walk. They progressed to standing and moving between fixed postures or asanas (tai chi originally was 13 postures), which were later linked as in Yoga's "sun salutation," training them to move. The movements were fighting techniques infused with meditative psychological discipline for a boost into the higher stages of spirit.
The teaching/ learning categories that I use as a curricular guide inspires and develops different but overlapping, interconnected intelligences which add up to holo intelligence. Without the systematic warm- up you may or may not reach all of the strands in the web of knowing. An Aikitaiji class is composed of mini- lessons of five to twenty minute length. You can learn many, different lessons in a class period if they involve different skills, stored in the memory in different but connected, coordinated and cross- referenced parts of the brain. In order to learn martial art, lessons must be encoded throughout the brain, tying the learner intimately to ever- wider panoramas of reality. In a class period, I teach a lesson from each of the categories outlined below, and review some that I previously taught.
1. Floor work- Tracing the evolution of movement, begin lying flat on your back, warming up from the ground. When the weight is off of your feet, a different nervous system funcions that preps the neuro- muscular- skeletal basis of upright standing. Inventory and relax the tension in the postural muscles used for standing so that you only have to use the right ones for movement. This stretching sequence will make you taller by relaxing chronic spinal tension.
2. Crawling on hands and knees, then hands and feet together like a spider, and knuckle- walking like an ape warms up good upright posture, waking an entirely different system. This is important for the core torso muscles and nerves which are relied on for coordination, standing, walking, and feeling comfortable and naturally selected for your body.
3. Bi- pedal movement
4. Standing meditation with ki tests for verification. This should be done in all postures of form and function.
5. Moving forms. Aikido staff form is a good preparation for the basic Tai Chi form and Tai Chi sword form. I also do the forms mirror- image backward which more than doubles their neural impact. When you learn a new piece of form, and before you can learn the next piece, your brain takes six hours to encode the lesson into the permanent storage area of the brain. If you learn a new piece of form, and then try to learn another new piece within 6 hours, the first piece will be lost or erased when you learn the newer one. Since you can learn only one form lesson at a time, it doesn't make sense to keep teaching form all class long.
6. Push hands- switch partners every ten minutes.
7. Tai Chi fencing involves the same skills as push hands as well as focusing chi outside your physical body.
8. Techniques with prescribed attacks and counters and specific applications from the form.
9. Chi or Ki development. There are exercises that develop the unconscious intelligence, such as the many ki exercises developed by Koichi Tohei.
Aikitaiji's training course relies on many divergent traditions ranging from the ancient art of yoga to the science of contemporary athletic performance ( an offshoot of the highly lucrative system of professional sports). The Aikitaiji course was arranged to provoke the countless and seemingly isolated areas of the brain, and retain its content through finely tuned, integrated movement.
"To 'pin down' a thought, there must be movement...thinking and learning are anchored by movement."--Smart Moves, Carla Hannaford.
The realms of the brain that are developed through skilled physical training are the same areas that govern memory, rule all forms of learning, actively promote creativity, assist psychosomatic health, and even strengthen the immune system by acting to stabilize unbalanced emotions such as depression and anxiety.
There are countless brain functions and domains of intelligence that a completely rounded human needs to flex. We each have individually preferred learning styles chosen from many different ways to know or sense, but they all have somthing in common with skilled, polished movement. "Movement activates the neural wiring throughout the body, making the whole body the instrument of learning."--Hannaford.
Movement facilitates learning by producing natural chemicals that enhance the growth of new neurons and neural connections in the brain (which is more than a body part) and the body ( which is not just an instrument of learning and awareness). In Aikitaiji the mind is the body or expression of your art and the articulation of your inner evolution.
Our training system seeks to upgrade neural highways connecting remote areas of the brain, generating neuronal growth somewhat like the muscles they control, developing in range, density and strength through exercise. Aimless movement affects the mind and body of an individual but coordinated, graceful, organized patterns such as those trained in martial art are immensely more powerful and wide-ranging.
"Every time we move in an organized, graceful manner, full brain activation and integration occurs, and the door to learning opens naturally..."--Hanaford. Add internal training and cooperative learning to graceful movement and you succeeed in further enhancing the benefits of skillful movement.
Mental functions can be generally isolated and attributed to certain locations in the brain, but most tasks require a state of coordinated mind and body, and martial art serves this integrative function.
Nearly every culture, past and present, shares the concept of a transcendent energy that we have in common with everything else--a collective force that identifies and distinguishes humanity's place in the web of cosmic events.
"All things and beings are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve. This is the power known to science as energy, to the Melanesian as mana, to the Sioux as wakonda, the Hindus as shakti."--Joseph Campbell.
There are as many names for this power as there are cultures. Mencius described "chi" (the Japanese word "ki" is used interchangeably with "chi" in this work) as an omnipresent energy, the source of matter, in support of life, which dissolves into the void and reappears transformed as humanity.
"Our lives are a part of the universal ki enclosed in the flesh of our bodies. Though we say that this is 'I,' viewed with the eyes of the mind, it is actually the ki of the universal. Even though that ki is encased in flesh, it is in conflux with and active as a part of the universal."--Koichi Tohei, Ki in Daily Life.
Chi is the energy of the cosmos, composed of body, manifest and immenent in every atom, binding every cell in our bodies, motivated and organized to shape the physical world. Embedded within and functioning as a causal agent of the transcendent reality is an individual's personal, internal power that it accessible because we are an active part of it.
Ki is relationship. Similar to the way the brain reinforces neural activity when learning takes place, a proper martial artist, through ki exercise, strengthens his connections within the web of nature, and when personal unity is realized (when mind, body, chi, and spirit are integrated) one's intimate relationship with the univers is revealed.
Tohei speaks of ki in relation to others and in harmony with the "universal." Ki binds all things together, so in a sense relationship is ki, and since ki is universal, we can't avoid relating to anything (not even the unpleasant things). Avoidance of relationship confuses and weakens one's ki.
Ki links the domains of self within a self, leading to wisdom that can only exist as a relative of nature. "To excite the chi means not only to stimulate one's own chi but to join one's chi to the chi of Nature so as to reinforce each other."--Cheng Man Ching, 13 Treatises.
You can't excite or stimulate your chi in isolation from the chi of nature, and the chi of nature expresses itself most clearly through humanity.
Whatever separates us from nature isn't external. It's our own chi made stagnant by avoidance of relationship. By exciting (extending outward) personal chi to reinforce nature, the whole human comes together, relating to his world, and as that work is accomplisehd a proper martial artist recognizes that his ki is also active "out there." Chi brings you to yourself, and a proper martial artist known that is also the way to know others.
On the deepest level a martial artist recognizes unity as the highest aim of nature, and so he establishes an energetic relationship between his chi and the chi of nature.
People and societies spanning all historic periods have needed to defend themselves effectively or die. Beside the need for air, water, food and shelter, people need to protect themselves from extinction so they trained to fight, hunt and form alliances. Warriors trained for war to protect themselves and their families, and formed alliances because a gang survives better than individuals do. Such alliances of individuals are villages, and villages form cultures that have traditions of martial expertise.
Once the martial masters made the village safe, they were able to pursue happiness. When the defense of the culture was assured through fighting (destruction) people were free to create, and since martial art serves the first, most vital, indispensable need (survival) martial art must have been the first of the arts.
Before an individual can evolve he needs to feel safe. Self-defense and the defense of society are primary needs that must be met before the "wants" can be pursued. After the needs are met and security is assured, people are free to create philosophy and art, the foundations of culture. The warriors were the first to feel secure, so the warriors must have been the first to philosophize and create art.
The first objects of art were cave paintings invoking the animal powers to provide food. A knife (a weapon needed for hunting and fighting) carved in the shape of a horse, is one of the first objects valued for purely aestheitc or artistic value. The first dances were fighting simulations. The first rituals concerned hunting and fighting. The first prayers to supernatural beings were for security and food, the procurement of which was the job of the warriors.
Besides serving security needs, the power of a master warrior made him the most logical canditate for "magical" inspiration. Warriors entered altered states of consciousness for their supernatural inspiration in order to mediate between the common world shared by all life and the mystical world. They were the pioneers of spirituality.
Self-defense and defensive technology evolved into the martial arts where poetry, painting, and calligraphy are common skills of martial artists. The routines of serving tea, arranging flowers and gardens, furniture making, and even cleaning the floor wer inserted into the list of arts thanks to the Zen belief that the most mundane acts such as chopping wood and carrying water are seen as spiritual acts.
"Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter."--Eliot. Time is a matter of great importance in martial art since fast movement is a primary goal, but time's implications and flexibility go much deeper than mere speed of movement.
Timing your actions to coordinate appropriately with an attack is more important than mere speed because if timing and blending are right, the opponent's own speed or momentum should be enough to cause him to fall. Timing your movements to match an opponent's movements neutralizes or cancels out the power and duration of his attack.
The suspension of the psychological or mental flow of time is the gateway to transcendence of the spirit. Meditation, a common exercise in martial arts, is the most influential tool used to synchronize the mind (inner) to movement (outer). Slow movement against an implied resistance is a meditative method that sways time in the physical field. Slow perfection of form is a meditative exercise that creates gaps in time and simultaneously trains the body to move within these gaps.
The mind (through an internal function that creates a flowing sense of time) organizes, sorts, frames, coordinates and defines our experiences so that they make sense. Due to this temporal framework, reality is experienced in present time, learned and filed in memory as "past," and anticipated in the "future" for the sake of cause-effect logical relationships. Each person's mind constructs its own relative time sense so that it can adjust the chaos of sensory information to a controllable level, and equip the mind with a logical format for movement and change (cause and effect).
Time gauges an event, providing a context for all emotions, hope or dread, and the various methods of expression and communication. We live and die in the interlude of time. Our safety as well as our bondage depend on, and happen within time.
The temporal mind operates within a comfortable range of consciousness, nestled safely below the threshold of both insanity and transcendence.
Soft is what you meet an attack with in order to neutralize it and hard is the symmetrical balance applied to the vacated place. Many push-hands students are so deluded by their false interpretation of softness that they actually get offended if you really push them. They don't understand that soft is what you meet hard with; what you neutralize an attack with and not what you push with when you counter an attack. Push is yang, yielding is yin. Don't mix that up.
Many Aikido students are similarly confused about the concept "aiki" or blending with energy. "Strength and size are important if, when an opponent attacks, you receive the strength of the blow in a collision-like situation. If, however, you brush the blow aside, the opponent must himself manage the force he has generated."--Koichi Tohei.
The quote above talks about yielding when meeting an attack. Within the range of the attacker's effective power, the soft martial artist withdraws or neutralizes. He doesn't meet force with force, but causes the attack to miss; allowing the opponent's hard yang force to reach beyond its intended conclusion.
The opponent provides the force you use to unbalance him. You may lead the opponent past his limit of balance, and apply a technique when he's at his weakest point, trying just to stay on his feet. At that point, he offers no resistance to a push or strike, and will naturally fall victim to a throw. After neutralizing the attacker's yang energy, causing him to float, choose from a menu of options for your turn that includes reasoning with him and ranging up to the physical class of techniques which include arm locks, push, pull, throws and strikes.
There's a clear admontion in the Tai Chi classics to let the force of a fly or the weight of a feather set you into yielding motion. In push hands, yield to the weight of a feather, unbalance an attacker with a four-ounce deflection and then surge from yin to yang at the proper breaking point, pushing the opponent away. This essential principle of softness tell us to use a force of four ounces to lead or deflect an attack away from us in the direction it intends to go. The four-ounce application on the yielding side is esentially a vacuum force applied to destabilize the opponent.
Why four ounces and not four pounds? If you apply more than four ounces, you have taken your turn and it is the opponent's turn again. The opponent can't feel four ounces, and so in unaware of being led, giving him the impression that his turn is continuing when, in fact, you're already taking his turn.
Copyright 2004 by Jack Livingston
Jean Paul Sartre said that matter itself is "congealed movement," an observation supported by physicists (string theorists) who say that vibratory movements of the smallest units of matter (strings of matter) pulse with a frequency that determines the string's identity.
"The diversity of things, their individuality, are only an appearance, a veneer."--Sartre.
The characteristic of the universe is change or movement--an energetic rhythm that a martial artist dances to. Beside the vibrations composing the body, each mind vibrates in frequencies that change moment to moment, and no thing can be called motionless, but a martial artist approaches the heart of stillness through his perfected movements. Relative stillness can only be found by refining the motion of mind within the body.
You come to the art with habitual movement patterns that are an impediment to skillful movement. Through standing meditation, slow form practice (if done properly) and a few auxiliary exercises you begin to replace these bad habits with better neuro-muscular patterns.
"To the extent that ability increases, the need for conscious efforts of the will decreases...with growing familiarity of the act, speed of movement increases and consequently the power. This may not be self-evident but it is correct. The slowness is necessary for the discovery of the parasitic superfluous execution and its partial elimination.. The superfluous in action is worse than the insufficient, for it costs us useless effort. Fast action when learing is strenuous, leads to confusion, and makes the learning unpleasant and unnecessarily tiring..."--Moshe Feldenkrais.
The Tai Chi master who slowed the form down must have known this about physical learning, and although many modern practitioners go slowly, they've discarded the structural lessons that Yang Cheng Fu left us in his photographic record. If you follow Yang's postures directly from one to the other, you can weed out the "parasitic superfluous" movements. If you're unable to follow correct form, and can't weed out the parasitic movements then you have core structural problems that inhibit movement, waste energy, put unecessary strain on the joints, and cause you to miss the surging tides of chi. Proper form requires a balanced symmetry of bio-mental systems. "Improvement in action and movement will appear only after a prior change in the brain and the nervous system has occurred."--Feldenkrais.
Copyright 2004 by Jack Livingston
"When posture (shi sei, form and force) is perfect, the movement that follows is perfect as well...a beautiful posture, an inner solitude, a free mind, energy (ki) balanced between cosmos, being, and strength of body, right breathing concentrated in the hara, and the consciousness attentive, clear."--Taisen Deshimaru, The Zen Way to the Martial Arts.
"If we concentrate on posture we forget to think and the unconscious can show itself."--Deshimaru, Ring of the Way.
We express our emotions through our behaviors, and emotions or feelings are also the consequences of our behaviors. One example is the fact that facial expresssions both express and cause the feelings they exhibit. Smiling is the cause and effect of positive emotion. We can infer that a person who smiles is happy, and it also turns out that the smile will cause happiness by relieving emotional tension and increasing oxygen, endorphins, and immune components. We smile because we feel happy, and we feel happy because we smile. We frown because we feel dejected and start feeling down because we frown. Scowl and be angry for relative reasons. Chicken or the egg? A paradoxical example of cause and effect more pertinent to martial art is the relationship between your internal states and your posture.
"A good stance and posture reflect a proper state of mind."--Uyeshiba. In the same way that facial expressions cause and engender their corresponding emotions, stance or posture expresses and produces either a confident or fearful state of mind or emotion. A confident, poised bearing induces self-assurance and empowerment, and a slumped posture discourages the mind, causing it to slouch into weakness, defeat and victimhood.
Perpetrators select victims largely based on weak posture or bearing so you can also say that behavioral posture causes feelings and behaviors in others as well as in us.
A good stance or posture should be your normal or routine stance since it has so much to do with whether you're in plus ki or not. Miyamoto Musashi wrote in the classic Book of Five Rings that in martial art "it is necessary to maintain the combat stance in everyday life and to make your everyday stance your combat stance."
Execution of any movement requires that you pass through a configuration of structural balance before you can lift a foot to step.
Since you must stand or pass through the balance point of your posture before you can dodge an attack or execute a technique, the advantage definitely goes to the one who doesn't need to stumble to the balance point before he can move. Therefore, the combat stance should be your everyday stance.
Copyright 2004 by Jack Livingston
A pregnant state of tension is the ground or context for life, the force that keeps the universal cycles evolving. Tension motivates the causal world and frames all relationships.
"The primal powers (yin and yang) never come to a standstill. The reason is that between the two primal powers there arises again and again a state of tension, a potential that keeps the powers in motion and causes them to unite, whereby they are constantly regenerated...if this state of tension, this potential, were to cease, there would no longer be a criterion for life--life could no longer express itself."--The I Ching (Book of Changes) translated by Richard Wilhelm.
As a spring inside a clock uses tension to express time in space, life relies on the potential energy of strife. The point of life is not to struggle to end tension or conflict. The point is to use the pre-existent tension (interplay of yin and yang) and life's conflict to intensify the light within, adapting courageously to the obstacles that collectively define, refine, and polish our lives. There will always be conflict (gravity is one permanent opponent) but fear or anxiety is optional. If we can encounter inevitable conflict as a call to adventure, then we're empowered to positively influence the entire energy field. But we're programmed genetically and psychologically to recognize conflict and change fearfully rather than challenging, and the internal system (ego, adrenaline etc.) that exists for that purpose can't tell the difference between threat to your life and common embarrassement.
As in all things there's a constantly changing point of balance or symmetry between too much and too little. Excess in any thing causes stress and, conversely, insufficiency is a condition of stagnation or atrophy. Stimulation is necessary for growth and learning, but as soon as stimulation passes exhileration and becomes stress (the point at which negative systems are activated and learning is prohibited) degeneration occurs.
Fear and desire are the most powerful of all ego trips. When you're afraid or desiring you're thinking only of yourself. When you're afraid you think of nothing but escape from the stimulus of fear and conversely, when you desire you think only of getting what you want. Fear is repellant and causes you to push away. Desire posesses you and makes you grap for things. These two faces of egoism sit at the bottom of the ethical hierarchy and on the highest level is the spiritual realization of unity where there is nothing to fear, and nothing to desire because you're in a state of sublime sufficiency. The term "selfless" has been used to connote such a state of accord, but it's more accurate to say that "self" spreads out, participates in and encompasses the general life-force. You don't become selfless when you overcome fear and desire as much as your small self blends into the flux of life. You become Self with a capital "S," inclusive of any object that can potentially cause fear or make you desire.
Fear ranges in intensity across the negative energy spectrum beginning with uneasiness or apprehension at the bottom of the scale, ramping up to stress, anxiety, annoyance and depression, and escalating all the way to panic or paranoia at the upper end of the gamut.
When you panic, your brain is obviously in emergency mode, and you can only react from your personal habits for dealing with crisis whether you're in a real crisis or not. The problem is that ego is so immature that it can't make fine distrinctions between a life-threatening situation and one that's merely embarassing, so emotion from any part of the fear spectrum will generally suppress all life systems even thought its functions are directed toward staying alive.
Fear establishes a dualistic mental state in order to dislocate the self (subject) from everything else (object). Fear confirms the individual self's primacy in opposition to, or in competition with everything else. It does so to preserve our survival but limits our perspective to egoic demands and restricts our actions to either fighting or running away.
"...Move within, but don't move the way fear makes you move."--Jelaluddin Rumi.
Copyright 2004 by Jack Livingston
One of the mind's principal functions is eliminative. The mind contains a safety feature that regulates consciousness for the sake of sanity. A basic function in our minds screens, evaluates, then excludes most of our potential sensory awareness, and focuses on what we need to survive. The healthy mind sifts through the glut of stimuli, appraises it, and then eliminates most of it. If all of the senses built into our brain, nervous system, and sense organ were reporting all of the stimuli they were receiving we would be so confused that our sanity and survival would be in jeopardy. Autism and attention deficit disorder are some common conditions that represent the fault of not being able to filter out distracting sensory information or to focus attention. Obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia and mania are among the consequences of over-stimulated chaos originating from inside the mind.
The existential problem with shutting down too much or staying shut down too long is that you become so accustomed to supressed awareness that it feels comfortably real, normal and safe. Most people remain bogged down at some point of under-exposure for all of their lives and are content to do so. But sometimes someone is exposed to the full flow where they emerge as insane or gifted depending on whether they can handle the full force of reality with positive emotional energy.
Joseph Campbell said that the difference between insane and gifted people is that the insane drown while the gifted swim in the same ocean of boundless consciousness. This ocean of ultra-awareness not only includes stimuli from the regular human senses but even the overpowering awareness of the collective unconscious, the level of awareness that we share with all other conscious beings. Each drop in the ocean is an individual mind that comprehends every other drop as well as itself. Those who drown are the ones that fear immersion in the super-conscious and can't stop it from flooding over them. They can't filter the endless currents to penetrate to a conscious connection and relationship of personal drop-ness to the one body of water. Those who navigate such currents elevate themselves and the rest of us by bringing clues back from the ocean of unrestricted consciousness. The internal warrior (among other explorers of the mind) opens the brain's restrictive safety valve, releasing him into greater, deeper, richer levels and dimensions of awareness--nightmarish if afraid and untrained, the light of grace to the fearless.
Get into super-awareness like you get into a hot tub of water. Dip your toe first, and as you accustom yourself to the heat, dip more and more until you can get your whole mind in.
Copyright 2004 by Jack Livingston
The way of the true martial artist as well as the way of the mystic, is the way of stillness through loss. Their problem isn't what to create, how to get where they have to be, what to obtain, what to do, or what to stand for, but the problem is this: what is there to lose, and how to go about losing it?
How is the mystic martial artist to mute his loud self and return to the common ground of all souls, allowing that dimension of the immortal here and now to assume his form, and how to move while in that form is the problem. Paradoxically the only way to gain mastery is though the frustratingly slow course of humbly subduing the self in the fine art of loss. Resistance to this difficult, painful process of dispossession is arrogant and retards growth. It doesn't matter how hard you try to obtain proficiency, if you can't subdue your greed for gain, you won't accomplish your potential.
"Yield and become whole.
Bend and become straight.
Hollow out, and become filled.
Exhaust and become renewed..."--Lao Tzu
The reason that it takes so long to learn martial art is because the learning process demands that you alter your nervous system and the muscular-skeletal structure that it controls to learn even the most basic technique. You have to surrender your accumulated mental structure to learn any of the fundamental principles and philosophical concepts.
There's a correct way to learn, and at least half of learning is unlearning, loss of the inessential, and the remodeling of habitual but inefficient ways of thinking and moving. The process of loss is the first step in the necessary replacement of wasteful and destructive habits of postural structure, movements, breath and consciousness. Careful, intentional unlearning and loss increases your potential for further learning. Deliberate loss of destructive habits of body carriage allows proper, pain-free movement.
Cheng Man Ching said that the simple reason that everyone fell short of his enormous skill was that he had faith in the fundamental principal of soft technique (investment in loss) while others looked for a path to victory elsewhere. He had faith that the more he surrendered his pride or egotism (yielded to others in order to straighten things out) and the more he relaxed his mind and body (relaxation is the loss of tension), the more he would gain. Any goal is achieved by recognizing what obstructs it and then by figuring out how to overcome the obstructions. For instance, you don't "do" relaxation; become aware of what causes your excessive tension and lose it. Relaxation is the loss of tension and chi is the fulfillment of the vacated space. Likewise, the flow of chi is not actively gained. Lose the impediment to it and chi is what's left.
Morihei Uyeshiba the founder of Aikido said the the essence of Aikido is zero. How much do you have to lose to get to zero, the infinite imperishable still point?
Copyright 2004 by Jack Livingston
Warriors intent on conquering their personal dragons, mystics following an inner call and shamans empowered to mediate between human reality and the causal world have unearthed clues leading to transcendence. Artists and scientists allude to it as well as they can but the prime insight isn't articulate. The literary martial classics portray the principles of the art and guide our behavior, but choreographed form (anchored by the postural pictographs) provides wordless access to the secrets of technique. Overlook or alter these formulas and directions from the past and you're guilty of hubris or arrogance and the consequence is your abiding ignorance.
"By contemplating the forms existing in the heavens we come to understand time and its changing demands...and it becomes possible to shape the world"--I Ching translated by Richard Wilhelm.
Since ancient times, in all spiritual traditions, changing the form of any ritual, power object, tool or weapon shorts out its transformative energy, while renewal through duplication of natural forms empowers them and reconnects the human to the higher powers. The perfect forms don't need to be invented or altered--just fitted or plugged into until the light finds its way through.
"In human affairs, aesthetic form comes into being when traditions exist that, strong and abiding like mountains, are made pleasing by a lucid beauty."--I Ching.
This is primarily a re-creative art. Humble and yield yourself until you fit into the forms of those who were animated by the light, then you'll see as they saw; with vision illuminated from within, projecting outward.
"Great artisans teach apprentices the formal rules, not the art."--Mencius. Mastery of the art requires an individual's replication of the classical, archetypal insights which are further revitalized by his unique expression in the shape or form of his own life.
"The formal rules remain constant throughout history; but art comes with maturity and is individually sought after."--Cheng, Master of 5 Excellences.
Copyright 2004 by Jack Livingston
Art, the articulation of internally accessed cosmic reality, reconciles the deepest part of every soul with its own infinite, silent source.
Art is a merger of light and human being, and the quintessential martial artist is a conductor of light. He's different from those working in the "fine arts" because his medium of expression is his psycho-physical self which he dips into profound stillness and then tints the world with its power; a process he repeats over and over again.
"Through him sounds a supernatural power, the same power which makes the animals speak and the earth render up milk and honey. He feels himself to be godlike and strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dreams. No longer the artist, he has himself become a work of art: the productive power of the whole universe is now manifest in his transport, to the glorious satisfaction of the primordial One." -- Friedrich Nietzche
When the power that Nietzche wrote about(chi/ki) resonates in the soul of a martial artist he is transported out of his small self into Self-as-work-of-art; an ecstatic work of art. Through this process the martial artist tunes into the primordial One, realizing and releasing the power of the gods outward from his center in widening, contagious circles of influence. If the artist resonates powerfully enough he may pull others along with him, entraining others' consciousness into harmony with his own inner peace, circumventing conflict, or if conflict is inevitable, he can disrupt the rhythm of the opponent's inner pulse to jam and confuse his balance and timing.
Copyright 2004 by Jack Livingston
We rely on words to process the overwhelming bulk of our thoughts and feelings. Human evolution accelerated at an astonishing rate with the acquisition of language. Child development is measured by the acquisition of oral skills, but spiritual development is determined by how well we can slip into silence.
Oral traditions carry the values, technology, culture, and laws of social community through the generations but simultaneously act to reduce consciousness to a manageable, minimal flow.
"Every individual is at once the victim and the beneficiary of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born--the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experiences, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.
Most people only know what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve."--Alduous Huxley.
Those who by-pass the reducing valve of consciousness are the gifted spiritual adventurers, among them internal martial artists.
The mind is a process primarily composed of words. Language focuses consciousness, forms self-concept in relationship, internally defines and then expresses personal philosophy, morality, and psychology. Even visual art, music and movement are expressions formed in an environment of internal dialogue, and discussed in the branch of philosophy known as "aesthetics." We experience the flow of mind, the stream of consciousness in time as a rush of words, but the spirit needs to slip into the silence between word-thoughts for a glimpse at immortality.
"Words move, music moves only in time; but that which is only living can only die. Words, after speech, reach into silence."--T.S. Eliot.
Copyright 2004 by Jack Livingston
