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Part Five: Please Make Him Stop Writhing, er, Writing!
by tuck
Mon 20 May 2002 19:53:27
Part Five: Please Make Him Stop Writhing, er... Writing! (Section One. Section Two is in comment One heh
Part Four covered the how and why behind studying in china. now ill discuss the important and controversial reason why the study involves nose knowing (i.e. why my nose is now more crooked than it was before). reintroduced at the very end of part four was the smell of smeared grass which represents the sometimes unforgiving but always genuine physical experience itself. now, here, im forcing myself into a physically experiential situation where the mental state in question, SAM, is required to manifest. yes, there are other was of exploring these things. no, they cant substitute for my work here. no, it isnt merely studying one of those chinese things which carry a requirement of psychophysical unity. yes, it has to be fighting. yes, of course i can tell you why.
there are three main reasons why the fighting approach is irreplaceable:
first, the reality and threat of full-contact creates a situation unable to be duplicated in other training atmospheres. my very first response to the consideration of a total absence of self under full contact or life threatening circumstances was that: if i dont perceive anything because my self is absent, then id have no self-care, no will to survive. without my self or my me wanting to resist death or loss, how could i possibly live or win? thats the real crux of the phenomenon in this arena: you do survive. in fact, thanks to SAM, your chances are better at surviving while in LRC for all the reasons previously mentioned: the lack of both emotion and controlled conscious thought provide a mental state allowing for heightened physical capability. when the LRC does take over under circumstances of explosive, violent action, its a serious achievement bordering on the mystical and it indicates a degree of ability unable to be explored in meditation rooms with incense or while doing tai chi in the park.
the second reason why this approach is important is because it involves a direct antagonist. unlike other methods of sinking into LRC (from target shooting to yoga), in a fight, as mentioned in reason-one above, there is the threat of violence and harm, but, in addition to causing harm, the killer/assailant/opponent (cool, new acronym: KAO, pronounced "cow", now to be written that way) is also specifically trying to prevent you from being able to obtain that silent fluidity. unfortunately, losing your self doesnt happen the instant you step on the platform. it happens completely unannounced and unacknowledged (because your self is not there to regard it happening) and usually in phases, if it happens at all. as mentioned, even under agreeable circumstances, this level of refined consciousness is elusive. but now, there's actually someone trying specifically to render you unable to SAMize by getting you riled-up, and otherwise emotionally involved. the COW (kill me now before it starts, please) is doing whatever it can to get the psychological advantage in the confrontation before attempting to grind you into hamburger. but youre utterly confident (oh god...it would behoove you to stop reading now); you know that if you can just shift into LRC, you won't be subject to their cowardly attempts, and, that physically, by milking the benefits of SAM, your chances of winning (surviving) are good. but, you also know that if you consciously wait for a shift to happen, it never will. if you want it to happen, it wont. if you NEED it to happen, it still wont happen. and then
********////BAM!\\\\**********
you get nailed, and it just mooooved twice as far away as it was before because now youre upset, maybe confused, probably herding and
********////BAM! BAM! KABOOM!\\\\\*******
...now youre lying on the platform looking up at twenty fingers, oh ok, there we go, only 5, now 6, now 7, now wait... is this a... but its only been... hey, i feel like eating lima beans. oh hi coach. what are you doing here? why are you speaking chinese? i'm a misslefish. oh hi coach. wo ye shi zhonguo ren ma? hen youyisu, wo hui shou hanyu. oh, hi coach, hanyu nihongo de iieba chyugokugo. pomplemousse?
the point here is that you cant talk yourself into refined consciousness even if your life is at steak. if you try, you end up merely helping the COW to keep you distanced from it and the LRC wont even graze you.
comments
tuck - Mon 20 May 2002 19:54:27
Please Make Him Stop Writhing, er, Writing! Part two only by silencing the inner voice is it possible to get there. but, of course, trying to silence yourself usually involves the very voice youre trying to silence. even under normal attempts at achieving a meditative state, that voice tells you (itself) to shut up, which creates more internal dialogue, which results in even more distracting noise. now imagine that because you want to attain the great state of SAM, the same distracting voice is not only telling the inner voice (itself) to shut up in order to get to LRC, but it's also threatening it: if you don't shut up, we're probably going to die, or at least have a lot less nose. this dialogue is not only internal noise, but typically a chaotic struggle for supremacy between two aspects of our consciousness, both of which get in the way of our SAM, and both of which are psychologically tiring. the fact is that we cant make any progress towards obtaining silence and the LRC until we abandon the struggle to do so. but abandoning this struggle to silence yourself while theres a COW intentionally trying to give you a whole stein of distraction and make you internally noisy is hard; each time you get hit or thrown, the LRC seems to move further and further away. but, because we know that it will help us survive, we inherently DO struggle for it, which is like kicking our hat away each time we try to pick it up. sometimes we just cant help but do this; our foot just keeps ending up right where it shouldnt be. this is an interesting, complicated new brand of parad-ox which i have not explained very well, and, what ive written is not exactly what i mean to say because im being bullied by wordplay and cant hit the bulls eye without serious manuring around this cheese. but, what i do have here is not just a bunch of bull; it is in range of intended meaning- its just not as clear as id like it to be. i can write about this more intelligently and maybe sometime i will. but for now... the third reason why the path ive chosen is important is because, through my lifestyle of bleeding and sweating with a chinese team under the coaches now caring eyes (which were not always that way- for at least the first 5 months the training was weak and i was basically ignored) now ive been accepted, to a degree. im able to ask them (chinese teammates, other chinese wushu athletes, coaches etc.) about these areas of interest and because they know that im training this hard and respect this aspect of their culture enough as to risk my health in exploration, they respect my interest and reply with an authenticity i would be unable to receive as a typical foreign student. i know some foreign qi gong students here who can't seem to penetrate the surface of their teacher's brain, and also some tai chi students in a similar position of being unable to get past mere physical instruction from their chinese masters. i think the danger and intensity of my branch of wushu dulls the racial lines, brings people together (not unlike war) and allows me a distinct avenue of entrance. Part Five here has slightly expanded upon some of the interesting ideas under investigation and has also spelled out the components of my particular field which make it important (to me at least) and unable to be substituted for. ill tie the philosophical king-point to SAMs little toe and then brilliantly bring absolutely everything together in Part Six: Part Sick Psychs, no Sex Sects? [sic] and then brag arrogantly about how im an enlightened, taoist-master baited-question-asker.