When you move up to a certain level of attainment, a major pitfall can be getting caught up in that stage because it is far more alluring than continuing on the path. However, if the process of progression is the top priority, then anything which does not bring you a step closer to beyond this is just a side show. This is why various systems have recommended seeking nothingness, which means you just continue up the ladder rather than stop and establish yourself.
Martial Arts is a powerful practice which aims to overcome weakness and suffering by way of self transformation. The goal is inner expansion, and by taking your capabilities to the next level repeatedly, the possibilities are limitless. If you look within yourself to the core, you inner being is trying to do just this. It is a question of allowing the body and mind to synchronise properly to allow it to just happen, whatever your current level of capability and understanding. It is not a theoretical practice, but an active and experiential one, where limitations are decimated by overcoming weaknesses over time.
By remaining fully involved and aware, you open up limitless possibilities for your ongoing progress. This is what Martial arts is, an ever evolving process. Because fighters have founded most martial arts system, their practices are of a physical nature predominantly. But some looked beyond this one aspect of training, and created systems such as Tai Chi and Aikido, as a way of developing inner harmony as well as physical presence. Therefore, the practices of Tai Chi for instance and the more physical systems such as boxing may seem at odds. However, the practices of Tai Chi, such as the ritualistic forms, are not so much for the practitioners sake, but to keep the culture and sense of devotion that it contains alive. What the practitioner does with the increased vibrancy of their system is their choice.
You must learn to organise your mind and body awareness in such a way that you create an atmosphere of optimal functioning. Whether you are big, small, athletic, fit, or otherwise, it is possible to enhance your functioning according to your present capabilities, and then blossom from there. It is not about developing super human abilities. It is about continuously moving up the ladder, and avoiding the snakes where possible so you don’t fall flat on your back. In other words, when you move up to a certain level of attainment, a major pitfall can be getting caught up in that stage because it is far more alluring than continuing on the path. However, if the process of progression is the top priority, then anything which does not bring you a step closer to beyond this is just a side show. This is why various systems have recommended seeking nothingness, which means you just continue up the ladder rather than stop and establish yourself.
In trying to play god, many martial artists have stopped half way along the path and by achieving things other people cannot, such as world titles or excessive awards. There is nothing wrong with this, it just isn’t the main purpose. Realising this, the masters of the past have advocated detachment from this, not because it is good or bad, but simply because if you want to transcend your current limitations, you need every ounce of what you have, and even then it’s still not enough to free you from the process of evolution and moving forward. As you can see, climbing half way up the ladder and then concentrating on how high up you are detracts from the precarious balancing act which is going on up there. This is when people fall or begin to doubt their position. This is why the traditional systems have always emphasised humility and service to others in the pursuit of attainment, to put stoppers on ones ego.
So the real benefit of martial arts practice is to view these successes along the way as indicators that you are getting to the core. In other words, you overcome one adversary as confirmation that you are in battle with the eternal enemy, which exists ceaselessly. Difficulty, and overcoming this, shows that you are doing the necessary work. You chop of one head of the hydra, and others reappear. What this means is that you are battling for existence, that you are earning your place.
The main purpose of advocating self advancement is to benefit the majority of people who have lost motivation or have no direction. In this way, martial arts systems have helped people achieve more than they thought possible, even if those system lack practical application to fighting. If you can overcome life’s difficulties, as well as attain new skills which enhance health and fitness along the way, then this is doubly beneficial. At the highest level, once you learn how to make every moment into a training exercise towards self realisation, then the martial arts specific forms become less of a preoccupation, but still important in many ways.
When an individual can make their everyday activity into a training exercise, going to the gym and clocking the hours is not so significant. On the other hand, once you have reached a certain level of progress, can you keep up that level of maintenance to keep evolving? How can this be ensured?
Turning your everyday actions into martial arts activity, in other words becoming mindful of your everyday gestures, is one way of ensuring that your mind and body remain connected and switched on to the process which is ongoing and that you have already been through. So we are not talking about maintaining a low base level of activity, we are talking about maintaining the body and mind so that you are fit enough to maintain the process of transformation that you have initiated yourself into. This can only be done if you continue to surpass yourself, climbing the ladder continuously in order to reveal more of the landscape. When this process becomes the norm, you will begin to intuitively anticipate difficulties in advance, knowing when to pay close attention.
The idea is not to create a system of practice or personal bearing which rivals someone else. This obviously happens sometimes, but it is limited in the sense that not everyone can be number one in a competitive system. This is because each individual is built differently. The idea is to live within and experience an environment which is conducive to personal growth. For example, the goal of traditional practices such as Shaolin Kung Fu is to make sure that as many people as possible are not without some method of practice which empowers them. In this way, there is no limit to the amount of pie that can be divided up between people, and things improve the better off more people are.
Today, well being for all through discipline and work of some kind is very much a possibility, because due to enhanced communication quality of living generally, the resources are not so scarce anymore. There is already a bigger potential for mass well being. Physically, the same old game of winners and losers is still going on largely, but in terms of inner development, well being, and self transformation, the possibility for exapansion is limitless.
When you eat food, this eventually turns into flesh and blood, through the process of digestion. This involves creating hormones, which is enhanced if your body is in a state of flow and charge. What scientists are now calling bioelectricity, is what Martial Artists have been calling Chi for centuries. Specifically, this is the amount of electrical potential that a cell membrane contains, which increases the aliveness of the organism and its potential for growth. So, if you can train the body in such a way that digestion, breathing, and exercises happen in a natural and optimal way, this creates a certain energy form which orientates the body’s chemistry in the best way possible. In doing so, the martial artist learns to create powerful forms of movement, and becomes vigorous enough to take on opponents if necessary.
The overall goal is to cultivate energy within yourself, not to dominate others, but if this is done properly you can do a lot with physical prowess. If you are able to dominate others but chose not to then this is a powerful thing. On the other hand, if your system becomes vibrant beyond normal parameters and you are empowered physically but your mind, attitude, and energies are not as they should be, eventually the system collapses, and the practitioner causes immense damage to themselves, limiting the possibilities of those around them as well as themselves.
Suppose today you became a black belt in this or that style of martial arts. It is similar to eating a big meal. Pretty soon, what you had accumulated will break down in your system and no longer supply you with the same energy or nourishment because it has done its job. You need to eat something new. When you gather many different achievements or ideas about things, slowly these form tendencies of their own. If these tendencies build up without fresh ones coming in, then it is no longer you acting from a position of intelligence, the centre. Instead, you risk becoming like an automaton, who simply recycles past acquisition because you identify with these.
The mind can be used to cut through things or to get caught up in them unnecessarily. If you cut through ideas and reality with a razor sharp sword – the mind, your understanding will penetrate reality to such a degree that you break it down so that it becomes fuel for your next endeavour. In this way, martial arts is a scientific practice, which allows you to take the process of growth and renewal, and ultimately life and death, into your own hands. There are many instances where, had someone been a littler older or more weathered and frail, they might have died from certain experiences. Realising this, the martial artists realises the the same forces of nature are best kept at bay by keeping the energies at a certain vibrancy, rather than polishing the body and mind. So when your stomach is hungry, you eat. In the same way, when your energies are hungry for more, you just make a plan to nourish yourself rather than becoming overburdened by the mind.
The life energies are switched on all the time. They record everything whether you are aware or not. Take the example of a bad nights sleep. The effects can sit with you the next day, effecting your mood and what you are capable of doing. In this way, the body has recorded everything that happens the previous night, and as a consequence you are tired. But, say you had a good nights sleep, you reap the benefits of increased energy levels the next day. So whether you pay much attention to sleep or not, the body does. This is the meaning behind meditation, to understand the body and become mindful of its ways and signals, which we will cover later in the book.
The turning arc of the earth is so much bigger at the periphery than from the centre. In the same way, what you are doing on the surface of practice takes so much longer to realise than the idea from which it sprang,
The idea of meditation, or one major aspect of it at least, is basically to work on your mind in such a way that you carry over the minimal amount of accumulated impressions from one day to the next. In other words, you wipe away the mildew as a conscious process. It will happen anyway, it’s just that you make this a personal responsibility.This is so that the body records a night of restfulness and ease, so that the energies renew themselves rather than fight of potential health problems. In this way, life does not ignore anything even if your awareness is elsewhere, so everything you accumulate from the outside becomes held in the body and must be released in some way.
The work of the day, the arguments, the violence done to others can carry over and putrify within if a certain distance form all this is not cultivated in your experience of reality. This can cause damage to the organism and its functioning. This is where meditation comes in. As a meditator, you have not removed negativity from your experience necessarily, but you have not identified it with your experience exclusively either. In other words, who your are and what the body and mind have accumulated are not differentiated, it’s just that these accumulations take on a smaller aspect of the overall being. This is because acquisition is not the goal. The goal is to extend the experience further, not to exclude any part of it, but to see each aspect reach its full conclusion. When you realise this for example, you will see that problems are stimuli to successes which have not yet reached their conclusion.
When you seek limitless expansion, it is not going to settle down, it is always seeking more. So when you exclude some aspect of yourself, if you are seeking the ultimate, then you will simply end up including that which you have desperately tried to discard. This is what it means to come full circle, you start off on the line and end up back where you started because you are travelling around a central axis. From the periphery as you walk along the earth it looks like a straight line, just as it does to the sailor at sea who is in fact going round the centre of the earth as he heads to the horizon.
The turning arc of the earth is so much bigger at the periphery than from the centre. In the same way, what you are doing on the surface of practice takes so much longer to realise than the idea from which it sprang, that it almost seems unrelated to this inner reality of ideas. So keeping on the straight line means to keep going out from the centre to the periphery. But one can go on about nonsense all day, you simply have to walk and live it.
