Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Pilot of the breaking momentum

We have all been there. Already on the freeway. In the slow lane. We are coming up on an on ramp and someone else is getting on. They are doing thirty miles an hour and working their brakes. They will do this until that moment they make the transition from the input lane to an actual traffic lane. Once they are in the traffic lane they stomp the gas and as soon as their vehicle is up to eighty miles an hour they stay there until they get off the freeway. Further, once that shift from entry lane to actual lane occurs, they will not use their brakes again unless forced too. All lane changes will be done with the accelerator.

Man has a mental inertia. Once this momentum is set it is hard to shift. It is difficult to change. What’s worse is that this software can be so well written into us that we don’t even realize that we are doing it. It takes an outside act in a lot of cases for the programming to break. You’ve probably been there too and seen it in action. When the same person is getting on the freeway and they are just about to make that transition from entry to lane, but another car is in the blind spot of their own vehicle they might hesitate between the brakes and the gas pedal as the program has been interrupted and has to be turned off to allow for direct input and access to the situation. There in lies the limitation of most minds, because they soon return back to the programming. The situation of having to interact directly has made them nervous or angry and confused them, the data that would have been useful to save, to incorporate into their previously established conditional responses is lost. Forgotten to the negative impact it had on them. That is to say, the event was not traumatic enough to alter the personality and the programming (as an accident would be), but was ‘embarrassing’ enough for the mind to dismiss it as irrelevant.

This sort of living is fine for the average person. But you are not an average person. You are an artist. Martial, sure, but artist none the less, and your responsibility as a unique individual, with limited time, and limited resources, it go in the only direction you can truly afford to go: inward. You have a dictated quest to question your own personality, your own reasons, your own actions. You have a requirement to become a thinking person, not an acting person, but a conscious, rational, individual in a sea of lemmings.

Programming, conditional response, limited capacity for introduction to new values/ideas, makes one predictable. And being predictable makes you a slave or even possible fodder / food for others.

Let me give you a ‘martial’ example.

We do ukemi (flowing / receiving) and kaiten (rolling) in our art. Observing the class doing backward rolls I noticed that every time students would sit down with their left leg out they would roll over the left shoulder. There is nothing inherently wrong with this as it is completely feasible that rolling on the outside is the best roll. But they do it subconsciously. If they were to put out the right leg, they would roll over the right shoulder. Again, nothing wrong. But a thinking opponent familiar with the roll would only have to witness this behavior once and realize exactly where his enemy was going to arrive. He would know how, for example, the hips of his enemy had to turn, which direction their torso was facing as the roll began. The direction of the head. The location of the arms. Etc. When doing the roll, then, one should learn to do the roll from both hips to both shoulders. Also, looking at the angle going out as the roll is processed: is it straight back, 60°, 45°? What is the intended consequence of the roll.

This is just one example of taking control of the situation, instead of just letting the software practice badly. I should study on this diligently. You see much like the guy who only knows how to use the gas pedal on the freeway, my art should not be a matter of building inertia. I am the master of this ship. I pilot it not simply by the course of the winds (the fluctuations of the mind), but by the direct interaction with the vessel.

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