When somebody wins a contest, they are ecstatic. When they suffer a loss they begin to doubt themselves, because their winning streak is over. This is a misunderstanding. It is because they have begun to doubt themselves that victory leaves them. Victory is not something that happens and then fades away the next day. It is something to pursue directly rather than dependant on some kind of situational advantage. If you sat on a chair in an unbalanced state, disorientated and irritable, you would naturally feel uncomfortable. However, someone who has attained a certain ease within themselves would feel comfortable on any kind of chair. So it isn’t to do with the conditions of the chair, the comfort level or the appearance, it is to do with the inner reality of the individual and the state they are in. This is what victory is.
Victory cannot be stolen by anyone, except by that person themselves. For many people, the sense of victory, or the inner balance within, has left them. This may or may not correlate with outside circumstances. These are just happenings rather than casual agents. Simply being able to train and to accept wins and losses as they are is victory. Victory has nothing to do with the contest of the social situation you’re in. These are just ways of defining it in a small way. For example, it was once understood in martial arts that you got better by undergoing constant challenge, whether or not you won. This prepared you for any major contest or life and death situation, not some prior experience of success or failure. It wasn’t necessary to win anything, just to undergo the most challenging situations that was appropriate for your development. This would vary from one person to the next.
Let’s look at a sporting example. To make an olympic wrestling team, it might be necessary to lose against the number one and the number two guy. This is normal, it just means you have lost to the best. This in fact means you have won in terms of extracting for yourself the best level of challenge and ensuring that you are motivated to improve. This stops stagnation which comes with being too satisfied with past results or limited expectations. So it’s just a case of following this process to the conclusion and eventually reaching the top. Many people drop out prematurely from similar situations when they are not used to this kind of atmosphere. This is why in Martial arts, one of the main tenets is humility. This does not mean getting used to being limited, it means embracing the best conditions for your development even if they are outside your comfort zone.
Victory is a process
So winning is not about a result but is a process. This includes ups and downs. In the situation of the olympic wrestling team, the number three wrestler might not know they are good for many years. this is necessary for their development, all they need to do is wait. If they can wait, without achieving what some of the others in the team are achieving, then that is all that’s needed. It’s just that people can’t pay attention to the process and just wait. This is one of the hardest things to do, because it seems as though others might be surpassing you.
If you can just train and wait for the process to take place within you, then everything begins to take shape naturally. For example, if the plant establishes a strong root, grows daily in a supportive environment, and takes its time, it will eventually become a big thing. It’s then able to create more leaves for itself, more pollen, more seeds, etc., Similarly, when you have created the right conditions, even the outside situations can be greatly enhanced. This increases your potential, even if there was none in the first place. So first of all, martial arts is about cultivating an inner potential. This is the reason behind the internal practices. They can be used to heal, in the so called healing arts, but at the same time they can be used before any damage has taken place. This is why traditionally, the Master in martial arts did not heap praise on the disciple, and in some cases didn’t even talk to them. All they needed to do was wait and to generate a potential which may or may not have been there or laying dormant.
A waiting game
If you take a nap under a tree, you do not call this losing at life. It is just taking a rest. It is a form of recuperating, so that the system can balance itself out. If you are asleep in the womb, the same thing happens. So each victory or loss, or growth, requires some kind of rest, which is not a loss but simply life functioning as its should. This is how growth happens, during some period of rest or down time. This can be done before or after a particular contest, for example. It can be done for no other reason than to generate some kind of energy, as in meditation. Sitting under the tree can mean sweeping the floor, or joining the lowly ranks for a time, symbolically speaking.
The fundamental reason why people don’t reach their potential is because their system is not kept in balance. In other words, they have not taken time away from the stresses and rigours of the external life. In martial arts, exceptional balance is needed. In this way, it is sometimes necessary to develop this balance with a persevering attitude by first establishing harmony, instead of plunging in before this balance is achieved. This is the reason for waiting. It is possible to charge ahead recklessly, as is done in the more athletic styles of martial arts. There is nothing wrong with this, it can be a tremendous development. But after some time, the natural urge to dominate and compete leaves the martial artists and after some accomplishment, it is natural to want to break free from it and move beyond it. In other words, to detach from identification with some kind of status, which becomes a limitation.
Planning the Process, not the Outcome
You determine what is victory, and what is defeat, just as you plan a strategy to win a contest. Exactly how the contest plays out and the conditions of your winning and losing are entirely in your hands. So you build the very victory in your mind, rather than the stipulations of the contest. When I say you build it, I mean the intelligence functioning within you to the best of its scope and ability. Whatever is built around that physically in terms o capability, is the outcome. So it is entirely up to the individual which kinds of conditions for victory they create. This requires a balance to be established, so that the system can functioning easefully. It is then possible to become a live process in the making rather than an outcome. In other words, you become the fight itself rather than an outcrop of it. Otherwise, all sorts of distortions and malfunctions can take place. So when you see things clearly, there is less of a need to do everything in such a conquest fashion. It is a disturbance in the system which creates this excessive need for conquest.
A grain of wheat contains within itself the means to create an entire plant, as well as to pass on itself to the next crop. In other words, it can reproduce what’s there, or transform itself into a growing life. At the moment, we are using our seed just to produce what’s expected of us in various situations. When the Art of war discusses the similarities between large scale and small scale war, this does not mean that you just fight like an army would on the individual level. Instead, what it means is that you mobilise the forces in order to change the world.
Inner Warfare
Depending on the situation in front of you, you either take over the world, or maybe bide your time. You don’t chose inactivity just because its not the situation you want. It’s about being active but receptive to the actual possibilities, rather than imagined ones. So you have spies, which give you feedback as to what is possible, where your weaknesses are within your kingdom, that sort of thing. The internal mechanism of the human has similar network which can be tapped into with such activities as meditation, mindfulness, and breathing exercises. It becomes obvious to even one who cannot see, because it is felt though the organism, through the to tissues and fascia for instance.
Your whole system is like a spiders web, and like the spider there are vibrational forces which you send through yourself by tapping into the breath. It is only though the subtle movements that the spider is able to send sonic forces through the entire web whilst maintaining its integrity. These forces or vibrations are not for therapy but to gather information, which is contained within an energy form. In the human, this is known as the energy body, which is said to have eight limbs like those of the spider, which includes the physical as well as the sensory aspect of the body. In other words, the sensory aspect of the body supports the structural capabilities of the physical. This is because if you become more intuitive, you can more easily sense damage and incoming threat by using this internal network effectively.
In the same way, you can mobilise the forces of your inner army to become the general and the troops at the same time. This means you plan the very process of engagement with the battlefield, the time and place, what you are willing to spend or sacrifice, all of these considerations. Otherwise it’s just endless skirmishes which go nowhere. When you think of victory and defeat in such a narrow sense, then war makes no sense at all. Unfortunately, increasingly martial arts is being throught of in such a narrow sense.
Victory in Defeat
You can work towards some outcome or become a process. Obviously, you can also fall somewhere in between. If you think of yourself as a winner or loser because of some result or some training you have had, you should know that you and a result are different things. A prisoner of war can be captured and then survive through sheer determination of his interior will power. It is not the house that stays standing but the experience of living in it, even in trying times. The blue print of a house might be good or bad, but it still has to be lived in. The builder may or may not know what they were doing when they made the house, and in any event, they may not know certain laws of living. However, when you learn to live in a house properly, it needn’t matter whether you are in a hut or a palace, you make the most of it either way. This is making victory out of nothing.
Victory is born within you, so in striving for it you will include everything that is involved with it. This includes defeat where appropriate. For example, you might think it’s all about winning over the enemy. This kind of thinking came about because somewhere people started thinking that they don’t need a rival to bring the best out of them. With the arrival or increasingly scientific methods, people started to think it was all about technical skills. This is like thinking a cultivated flower will be a tenacious as a wild one. It may look better, but it needs all sorts of artificial supports. This accounts for something but not everything. It is like if you fatten a pig on a farm, it seems like this is what a pig is. But as soon as you open the gate and it runs in the wild as nature intended, then its starts to drop the fat and returns to its usual state. Such a pig would be more adapted to the wild even if it lost its comfort level. So this is not really a defeat for the plug, only the owner.
The contest is half going on in the opponent and half in you. In other words, it’s inside and outside of you, it’s just that there is a thin bubble which separates the two which we are seeing as big barrier. This bubble is the boundary line between your inner experience and the outside, which are one and the same. So when the experience is felt only from within, you become like the fat pig on the farm which is functioning outside its environment. You don’t realise it, but you need the outside will environment with less comfort. The grain of wheat that came from a plant, doesn’t know where it came from originally nor does it care, it still was born of a process. In the same way, the pig that finds its freedom does so of its own nature, but with the existence of a wider experience functioning through it.
