Zen Karate, Easy to Do…Too Easy
I love the concept of Zen Karate, having a mind of no mind, but not many people really understand what it is.
Zen is like saying knowledge. having no mind, that is like being focused on one thing, to the exclusion of all else.
The phrase the Japanese came up with to describe this is mushin no shin, or ‘Mind of no mind.’
Really, it is you, the spirit, looking out at the world, dealing with the world, without having a mind to get in the way.
Sounds odd, eh?
But what is the mind?
What are you?
You are awareness.
The mind is…not.
I’ll let you cogitate on what exactly the mind is, but while you’re doing that, let me tell you a story.
I was doing a kung fu exercise with a fellow one time. We were both heavy into karate, but our instructor taught us this thing called sticky hands, and something interesting happened that day.
We were standing, face to face, our arms entwined, and I decided to equalize my awareness, to be equaly aware of both sides of the body.
I fed my awareness out my arms, being careful to put exactly the same amount of awareness into each arm. As I reached the fingers I suddenly popped out of my body.
I was sitting there, my awareness like a lighthouse beacon shining down on my partner.
He, of course, felt it.
He tried to move, but he couldn’t, I had taken control of his body.
Problem, I had taken so much control I couldn’t move. We were stuck in exercise, unable to have motion, a vast energy pouring through me.
Finally, I got scared, and i snapped. I punched my partner in the chest. The hand flew out, he flew back and hit the wall, and POP, I was back in my body.
“What the hell did you do?” He exclaimed, rubbing his chest. He later told me he had never been hit that hard in his life. But I knew that. I had hit him from outside the body, and with more energy than the body is capable of containing.
That was just one of the times I experienced the state of ‘no motion, of not having a mind in and through the martial arts.
Interestingly, I will say that in this specific instance it was a combination of karate forms training, and the softness of the kung fu exercise, that enabled me to do it.
Through one or the other I would not have reached it, but through both…yes.
That is one of the problems of the martial arts, they have become compartmented, rueld by true believers, and people lack the ability to put them together. Putting them together is one of the benefits of Matrixing. Matrixing enables one to combine arts logically and quickly. There is no other technology in the world that can do that.
Anyway, that is just one of the experieces I have had of Zen Karate and the mind of no mind.
