You often say, "I
would give, but only to the deserving."
And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride,
that you should see their worth naked and their pride unabashed?
(Kahlil Gibran)
Learning
To learn, a person must let go
of what they already know and be prepared to embrace the unknown.
Everything that you know is in the past.
The unknown cannot be known.
Learning must begin by letting go.
There is nothing to be
afraid of; it is natural to be uncertain, to have doubt, to be
ignorant.
Thought and reality
Reality simply exists, whereas
thought is how we regard
reality.
The two are seldom the same.
In tai chi, conscious thought is considered to be a form of tension, of
anxiety.
In order to see reality as it is, we must remove the barriers that impede
our minds.
Krishnamurti,
taoism and
zen all help this process.
Preconceptions about tai chi
Many people have seen an example
of tai chi-like exercise and have some idea of what they think it is about.
These ideas are often
flawed because knowledge can only be based upon what
you have personally experienced.
If you try and shape tai chi to suit your impression of what the system is
about, can you truly claim to be performing tai chi at all?
To learn, you must let go of your memories and opinions.
Letting go of stress
Letting go begins in the
mind
and spreads throughout the body.
Unless we can
relax our thoughts and let them cease of their own accord, the
body will not loosen.
Stress is the straining process between one thing and another, the prolonged
conflict between reality and our idea of how it should be.
Without resistance, there cannot be stress.
Tai chi is the art of balancing ourselves with reality, of letting go and
moving with
tao.
The Japanese poet Basho wrote haiku about
Chuang Tzu and a butterfly.
He used the
butterfly as a perfect metaphor for drifting without concern.
Letting go of anxiety
What is anxiety?
Is it not a state of worry in which the mind considers various future
possibilities and attempts to avoid problems by anticipating what will
happen?
Let go of anxiety.
Worry comes from fear of failure.
If you fail, so what?
What is the worst thing that can happen?
Be spontaneous.
Be alert and alive, capable of moving in any direction without anticipation.
Respond to what is happening in the world, not to the worries of your mind.
To quote from the Christian tradition:
Which of you for
all his worrying can add one day to your life,
one inch to his stature?
So don’t concern
yourselves so much with the means of life;
what you shall eat or drink, or with your bodies,
and how they should be clothed.
Life is more than clothing.
Consider the
lillies of the field;
they do not spin,
they do not weave,
but not even Solomon in all his glory was so arrayed as one of these.
(Jesus of Nazareth)
Page created 29 December 1998