Newsletter 1016
A Bit of Effective eMartial Arts Philosophy
What a day!
I just saw a duck walk past
with seven ducklings behind her.
Cool.
Okay, a real secret of the universe today.
Not one of those shabby, second rate secrets,
but the real goods.
Let’s set the stage…
What is the universe?
A bunch of objects floating through space.
Not much of a secret, eh?
Until you consider what this means to the martial arts.
A fist floats through space
it is aiming for your jaw.
Now,
two things may happen,
and only two.
The fist connects,
or it misses.
And there is the secret.
What?
You don’t see it?
Okay,
sigh.
Here we go.
If the fist connects it is force.
If the fist misses it is flow.
And that’s ALL there is.
A guy connects with you,
or misses.
Force bad if his fist hits you.
Force good if your fist hits him.
Sort of.
Flow good if fist misses.
Flow bad if it wasn’t a fist,
but a beautiful girl
that was trying to ‘connect’ with you.
I know
thats too simple to be a real secret.
Let’s go further.
Without force the universe stagnates and dies.
Hey,
no punching,
but also no sex.
No resultant familes.
No civilization.
We’re all alone,
man IS an island,
and that’s all she wrote, brother.
So the universe needs force to survive.
Except,
here is the problem,
and this is starting to become secretive,
or at least,
you’ve probably never heard this…
The universe teaches force.
It’s got to to survive.
And the real problem here
is not that the universe teaches force,
it is that man buys it.
And,
man never buys flow.
He has been trained not to.
The universe won’t reproduce
and give him all those nifty things
like cars and buildings and TVs and so on,
if he doesn’t buy force.
Which means,
anybody who buys into force too much
is only living half a life.
He is only living the force part.
The force part gives him
MMA,
wars,
cars,
diseases,
and so on.
The flow part gives him something else.
But to understand this
we must understand the benefit of flow.
Here’s some stuff to think about.
If you go away from something…it’s gone.
If you go towards something there will be impact,
with good and bad potentials,
and resulting vectors and new shapes and forms
and so on.
But if you go WITH something…
if you flow with them,
not colliding,
but encouraging harmony…there’s the other half of the universe.
there is art
and beauty
and love
and children playing in the fields.
Okay,
I hope this train of thought has encouraged
a realization or two,
and thus qualifies as a good secret.
Let’s go one step further.
The incredibly sad truth
is that a person can’t really understand truth and beauty
until he understands rot and ugliness.
And,
in the martial arts,
if you don’t learn how to maim and kill,
dismember and rip body parts off…
you won’t understand this thing called ‘Flow,’
and truth and beauty and all that sort of thing.
So,
God,
this is going to sound like a fortune cookie,
or a bumper sticker…
“You can’t learn the soft arts
unless you have learned the hard arts.”
This is a tremendous statement
with incredible ramifications,
and I know I have said it before.
Simply,
you must have yang to learn yin.
Funny,
the actual place I learned the concept,
to help me describe what I was understanding
through the discipline of arts
was in The Tao.
Something about…
‘there is no high without low.
There is no forward without backward.’
Okay,
this is sort of basic Neutronics,
for anybody who is interested,
but let me give you
the obligatory advertisement.
Check out the video
halfway down the page here…
I wouldn’t have understood all these things
about jointlocks and pressure points
and balance and how the body works
if i hadn’t dabbled in the softer arts.
And,
let me tell you, brother,
these things are incredibly functional
if you have the hard to understand them.
Anyway,
the conclusion…
The universe teaches force.
Humanity teaches flow.
You have a wonderful choice and opportunity here.
Have a GREAT work out!
Al
BTW
My novel, Monkeyland, is worth the read.
Check out the five star reviews on Amazon.
