The goal is to survive and even thrive in situations that are essentially hostile to my energy and essence.

And here I begin to understand, more deeply, why martial arts keeps calling me, even though I do not now nor have ever lived in an atmosphere in which I experienced or even witnessed much physical violence. Because such arts are among the few ways available that are supposed to teach you how to survive raw, dangerous encounters.

I’m finding Peter Ralston’s Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power, a book on martial arts philosophy, to have good application my struggle to extend my effectiveness “horizontally,” that is, to be effective in this reality, in a real-world way, rather than merely spiritually developed and practically weak.

Here’s an excerpt that discusses posture, in a way that I’d like to read as not merely about physical posture, but mental-emotional alignment as well.

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Though it may seem very abstract, this theme of forms has many direct applications, the most relevant one at the moment, for me, being in the field of interpersonal relationships.

The easiest way I can illustrate this is by evoking your own body’s experience of other people. There are people who just “push” you back. They have wide eyes, loud voices, forceful demeanors. There are other people who “suck” you in. They have soft voices and shy demeanors. There are people who don’t say what they mean, or whose smiles never reach their eyes, and they actually feel “slimy.” There are people who feel bright, people who feel dark, people who feel solid, people who feel frail. And this often has nothing to do with their physical body type.

This is the “form” of personality.

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I found a really fascinating and powerful story about the nonviolent path of transforming enemies into friends, in Walter Wink’s book The Powers That Be.

On a Sunday morning in June 1991, Cantor Michael Weisser and his wife, June, were unpacking boxes in their new home, when the phone rang. “You will be sorry you ever moved into 5810 Randolph St., Jew boy,” the voice said, and hung up. Two days later, the Weissers received a manila packet in the mail. “The KKK is watching you, scum,” read the note. Inside were pictures of Adolf Hitler, caricatures of Jews with hooked noses, blacks with gorilla heads, and graphic depictions of dead blacks and Jews. “The Holohoax was nothing compared to what’s going to happen to you,” read one note.

The Weissers called the police, who said it looked like the work of Larry Trapp, the state leader, or “grand dragon,” of the Ku Klux Klan. A Nazi sympathizer, he led a cadre of skinheads and klansmen responsible for terrorizing black, Asian, and Jewish families in Nebraska and nearby Iowa. “He’s dangerous,” the police warned. “We know he makes explosives.” Although confined to a wheelchair because of late-stage diabetes, Trapp, forty-four, was a suspect in firebombings of several African Americans’ homes around Lincoln and was responsible for what he called “Operation Gooks,” the March 1991 bombing of the Indochinese Refugee Assistance Center in Omaha. (He later admitted to these crimes.) And Trapp was planning to blow up the synagogue where Weisser was the spiritual leader.

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More gems from Walter Wink’s Engaging the Powers. This is what I was trying to say in my post on presuppositions invisibly dominating life, except it’s stated much more clearly and coherently.

The world-atmosphere also teaches us what to see. “One can say not only that as individuals we live within a sociocultural organism but also that the sociocultural organism lives within us. Not only are we individual units within an organized society, but organized society is represented and incarnated within our brains.” Whatever the System tells our brains is real is what we are allowed to notice; everything else must be ignored. “We give the system the power to make the known unknown.” Thus we are taught to mistrust our own experiences.

Every observation is a directed observation, that is, an observation for or against a point of view. Every mind is a “contaminated mind,” a mind constructed of a network of suppositions and assumptions. All descriptions are paradigm-conditioned and value-laden. A Skinnerian and a Freudian will not only describe the same behavior in incompatible ways, but their conceptual frameworks actually cause them to see different behaviors. The observed behavior is different in each case. The result of this limitation on what we are allowed to see is a miniaturization of our living world.

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In my search to understand this difficult-to-grasp experience of being pervasively but invisibly oppressed, I return to progressive Christian theologian Walter Wink. In Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, he describes really well what I feel I’m up against.

It is characteristic of the Powers that, although they are established, staffed, and perpetuated by people, they are beyond merely human control. It was the experience of a total system operating (as it seemed) autonomously and even, at times, malevolently, that gave rise to a perception fo the role played by the Powers in human destiny. “For our struggle is not against enemies fo blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12). The Powers are the structures and institutions, in both their outer and inner manifestations, that embody the Domination System in any historical moment.

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One of the most amazing stories to come out of World War II concerns a church leader in Bulgaria named Metropolitan Kyril. When the Nazis rounded up the Jews in his city and herded them into a barbed wire enclosure, he decided to act.

The train that was supposed to take the Jews to Auschwitz pulled up at the station. The S.S. guards were just about ready to load the Jews into the box cars that would take them to the gas chambers, when suddenly, out of the darkness, Metropolitan Kyril appeared. He was a tall man to start with, but as an Orthodox priest, he wore a miter on his head, which must have made him appear like a giant as he emerged out of the darkness. He was wearing his black robes and his white beard hung over them. Marching behind him were many of the townspeople.

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My recent post, “Emulating Evil,” touched on violence as a metaphor, or an extension, of the constant need to negotiate with something outside oneself in order to survive and thrive in this dark world. Lately, then, I’ve been thinking about martial arts. I’ve been thinking about my experience a few years ago with Chen tai chi master Gianfranco Pace, and how seeing his awesome ability made me quit tai chi. I’ve been thinking about observing Shaolin master Wong Kiew Kit a couple of years ago, and how his ability made me drop out of kung fu class for awhile. I’ve been thinking about how I didn’t think I had the heart to learn how to fight.

But I’m beginning to realize that there might be a bit more complexity in my response than I gave myself credit for.

Let’s take a step back for a moment. Martial arts these days are practiced by many as a hobby. Even the masters of the art, what do they use it for? Do they do anything with it other than teach students and compete among themselves? Most of them don’t. Their hand-to-hand combat skills aren’t relevant in war these days, or even in private self-defense. A punk with a gun could shoot a famous xingyi master. So martial arts tend to devolve into their traditions and competitions. Are these things what it’s all about?

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Trying to engage the immanent, the Divine in the mundane things of this world, means running headlong into that which is petty, dark, impure, and even evil. Spirit shines freely where things are already pure, but that’s not the way most of the world is. And maybe that’s not even the way the world is supposed to be.

In the Jewish mystical text called the Zohar, there’s a little parable that talks about evil. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan paraphrased it thus, in his book Jewish Meditation:

A king once wanted to test his son to see if he would be a worthy heir to the throne. He told his son to keep away from loose women and to remain virtuous. Then he hired a woman to entice his son, instructing her to use all her wiles with him. The Zohar then asks the rhetorical question: Is the woman not also a loyal servant of the king?

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To open the new year, here’s a discussion of Divine Love and karma from Rawn Clark’s essay, Dimensions of the Divine.

Divine Providence provides us with exactly what we need, exactly when we need it. It never places before us something we don’t need. Even the vilest of circumstances are, from the Divine perspective, necessary. Furthermore, they are presented according to the Universal Legality, which means that the form in which they are presented is the only form in which they could, in that moment, be presented to us.

The consequences of this astound the mind if one contemplates them deeply enough …

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“Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

– The Kybalion

I’m in the Los Angeles area visiting family for the holidays. Being here again is intense. In a way, all the sensitivity that I’m developing really works against me here; in another way, it shows me more directly and viscerally the violence that the senses are dealt.

I notice that every single square foot in this city is controlled and manmade. Roads, sidewalks, signs, buildings. The patches of green here and there are strictly circumscribed, trimmed, mowed.

I go to the nearby mall, and it’s the holidays, which means that it’s a hell of a time to park. I circle for twenty minutes in this huge parking lot before snagging a spot. Then I go inside, and the lights and sounds and people and everything are all bright and flashy and plastic.

And I think about how the way of nature is to blend and harmonize. And I think how the way of modern society is to cry out for attention: Advertising, fashion, cars, people. But the net effect of so many voices yelling so loud is to numb.

I feel everything as vibration and energy, and around here even the bushes, trimmed into profanely round shapes, vibrate with a pseudo-artificial buzz. The colors and sounds and conversations and machines all jostle and scream with the discord of a heap of humanity not knowing its purpose or place in the scheme of things, having forgotten about the rhythm and ritual of sacred life, and aligning instead with the vastly entertaining and ultimately illusory artifacts of the material world.

I feel the vibrations screeching like a cat being dragged across a blackboard.

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