Category Archives: Philosophy

I grew up during a time of international anxiety.  When I left school in 1979 the principal topic of conversation among my peers was, what would we do when the 4 minute warning came? Notice, not, ‘if’ but ‘when.’  We totally expected that at some point we would be in a nuclear war with the USSR.  We were babies when the Cuban missile crisis put us on the brink, and our whole lives had been a preparation for global annihilation.  People actually discussed whether the super powers had enough missiles to turn the Earth into a new asteroid belt where the planet used to be or only sufficient explosives to scorch every living thing on the surface, creating a global radioactive desert.  I was thinking about the effect of such deliberations recently because of a renewed concern over war.  In the last couple of years, the Chinese minister of defence has said that they (the civilians) should prepare for a nuclear war and Russia has run a disaster drill involving some 40 million people to ensure their preparedness for a nuclear strike.  I’m actually not overly concerned about the prospect of war.  Really.  Such stories, I suspect, have their roots in other political agendas.  If a government wants to justify spending a lot on defence, perhaps because some decision maker wants to do some manufacturer a favour, then such announcements will ease the way.  If a government wants to distract its own people from one story, it feeds them another.  There’s nothing like a bit of posturing, showing that you are prepared to go to war, before negotiations start over some apparently unrelated issue, to strengthen your position.  No, I suspect that we are not really any nearer a war than we have been at any time over the last couple of decades.  I’m interested in how such considerations affect us.  It’s a bit like having a health scare.  The doctor tells you that you might have some frightening terminal illness and while you are waiting to hear what is in store for you, you take stock of your life.  You consider the purpose of your life choices.  Some people will become more selfish and hedonistic; the realisation that one way or another, they are going to die and life is always short, causes them to think, let’s just have a good time and enjoy what time they’ve got.  Others will try to make their life count by doing what they can to help others and make some positive impact with what little life they have.  Others will determine to fight every inch of the way; they won’t go quietly and meekly into the grave.  What is most significant is what they all have in common; they all examine the purpose of their life.  They begin to value more every moment that they have.  Very few people can live with high levels of fear and anxiety for long and simply go on with their life as they were.  To this extent, the scare stories do us a favour, they make us look at our lives and question our attitude, our path, our choices.  You could call this Mindfulness.  You could call it living consciously with our eyes open to the reality of our mortality.  Whatever you call it, it helps us to live in the moment, appreciating our life as we live it.  Threats to our lives enhance the pleasures of the moment, the beauty of each breath, the joy of our relationships with loved ones, the exquisite details of the natural world in all its fascinating expressions.

It may be that when we live in such safe, (yes, in spite of the current pandemic) sanitised societies, so separated from the dangers of life in general that we can become distracted from the moment and the important things.  Most of humanity have lived with the fear and anxiety of the prospect of imminent and brutal death, whether from natural disasters, famine, disease, war or whatever and we are in many ways the exception.  We can easily live our lives isolated from such realities.  We (our particular culture) are so separated from the daily threats to our lives that have been common to people throughout history and around the world that we can carry on as if we absolutely expect to live in peace and good health for long, happy and productive lives.  Now I hope we all do.  My point is that such a life has not been the norm for people and such high expectations might make us less able to cope with periodic scares and in some ways makes us more dulled to the wonders of life and more distracted from its more genuinely, meaningful experiences.

Seen from high enough all of life’s problems are small.

A famous economist, when asked why he had no economic model for the long term, only the short and middle term, responded that in the long term we’re all dead.  This has always come to mind when I’m in need of putting things in perspective.  I recall having yet another crazy deadline for data analysis when I was Director of Philosophy and Ethics at a high school and being asked by another subject director, why I didn’t appear to be stressed about it.  Had I finished already?  Had I got an extension on when the analysis had to be done by?  How could I be so relaxed?  I said at the time that if I got a chance to do it, I would do it, if I didn’t, then I wouldn’t and in a hundred years I’d be dead so either way, in the long term it didn’t matter.  In retrospect it turns out that it really didn’t matter.  The analysis involved using a complex equation to estimate the students’ exam grades, and I knew from previous experience that my educated guess, based on knowing the kids, was always more accurate.  Also, some kids did well in their exams, some did less well and my estimation on what results they would get had no impact at all.  You see, the hidden point of the analysis was to figure which kids would be on the C/D boarder line and then they could be given some extra attention, because the school’s reputation was more determined by the percentage that got C-A*.  But I mainly ignored such issues and I gave extra attention to any kid who wanted it, rather than those who, for political reasons, I was expected to help, because teaching those who want to learn is hugely rewarding while trying to teach those who don’t is not.  When someone in the street asks you for directions, see how well they pay attention, but then go and try giving those same directions to someone else who hadn’t asked for them and see how much they value your input.  This is all about perspective.  If you rise above the day to day details that bog us down and see the big picture, you can often free yourself of unnecessary stress.  Ask yourself, what is the purpose of this particular task that I’m getting stressed over?  What is the purpose of my overall function in this context?  Perspective is often all you need.  If you back up, rise above, look at you current problem within the context of this whole century and within the context of the whole world, everything looks different.

We do this with our kids when they won’t eat their veggies or whatever.  We tell them that there are children starving who’d love this food.  When they won’t go to school because they have the wrong shoes or phone or haircut, we point out that other children walk miles in bare feet for the privilege of sitting in a class of a hundred with no pens or books.  We try to give them a global perspective.

When I’m teaching Kung Fu, I see myself as part of a long tradition of people reaching back (and probably forwards) for thousands of years.  In times of peace and times of war, the need to train never goes.  From a perspective of seeing humans on this Earth over millennia, we see a creature that is capable of being almost angelic and downright demonic.  To be prepared to deal with humans at their worst is one reason to learn Kung Fu, but to personally try to become an example of humanity at its best is another.

If you get bogged down with the difficulty of perfecting some tricky technique, step back and see the big picture.  See how the skill development and the character development are changing you in the long run.  No one ever made anything well without the frustration of working through difficulties, but learning to relax, see the big picture and not stress about the detail is one of the very best skills you are learning.

It might sound morbid, but next time you are stressed about some detail in your life, ask yourself; in a hundred years’ time, when you are dead, will it matter?  When some new piece of wonderful technology or some must-have fashion accessory is beyond your grasp and the lack of it threatens the very prospect of your life continuing with any meaning at all, step back and look at the whole century.  In ten years’ time the thing you crave will be an embarrassment to you; trust me on this, I’ve seen pictures of myself from the seventies.

It is one of the privileges of age that the older we get, the more of history we see and it becomes easier to have longer/higher perspective.

One root of both depression and anxiety is where you live…

Anything that requires your total focus on the present moment will distract you from other issues.  How can we use this knowledge to an advantage?  What are the issues that we should be avoiding?  Very simply put, the past and the future, because more often than not their consideration is unhelpful.  Let me be open this up a bit.  

Some people live in the past, some with regrets that are irresolvable, dispiriting and ultimately depressing.  Some live in the past with a, usually false, sense of nostalgia (even nostalgia is not as good as it used to be) but enjoying happy memories can easily become grasping for a lost past that can never be; this also becomes depressing.  Of course, the past should be remembered.  At the very least, so that mistakes aren’t repeated, but also so that opportunities for gratitude aren’t missed.  But the past is only a place to mentally visit, you can’t live there.

Some people try to live in the future with optimistic expectation.  They are like people on a cruise ship holiday, who instead of enjoying the views as they pass and the wonderful amenities of the ship, are locked in their cabins eagerly hoping that it will be great when they arrive, not realising that when they ‘arrive’ the cruise is over.  Some people will spend the week, waiting for the weekend.  They work through the year waiting for their holiday, but because they are in the habit of thinking in this way, they can’t help spending their holiday counting down the days till they go back to work, usually with dread.  They tell themselves that things will be great when they leave school, when they finish University, when they get a boy/girl friend, when they get married, when they have kids, when they get that promotion, when the kids leave home.  These people look forward to retiring to the point that they wish they could miss all the bit in-between.  Then they look forward to grand kids coming to visit.  Optimism for the future can easily express itself as a permanent sense of lack and distress in the present moment, and we only ever live in this present moment.  That, of course, is just the optimistic ones.  Others will spend their lives noticing the uncertainty of the future and realise that so many things could go wrong that they spend all their time worrying about so many things that if any of the anticipated bad things that actually happen, have already accounted for more suffering in its anticipation than it will in its actualisation.  Again, the future is a place to mentally visit. You should consider the good prospects and look forward to them, consider the possible dangers and take sensible precautions.  But you can’t live there as it doesn’t exist.  The tendency to live in the future creates great anxiety, whether you are optimistic or pessimistic.

Obviously, some clever people manage to flip between the past and the future in their thoughts and manage to have both depression and anxiety.

Right now, is the place to live.  Look out of the window and enjoy the ride.  Stop and smell the roses.  This moment is probably not that bad.  Probably none of the terrible things that have happened in the past are happening.  Probably none of the terrible things that might happen in the future are happening.  Right now, billions of bits of information are entering your brain from your senses and most of them are nice.  Take a moment to notice everything you can feel from your toes to the top of your head.  Notice everything you can hear… everything.  Now use your peripheral vision to take in everything you can see.  (Fix your eyes on one point, then notice the very right and left, top and bottom of your vision).  What can you smell or taste?

Whatever you are doing give it your full attention.  Notice the good aspects of it.  When you are washing up, notice how wonderful warm water is!  You’re waiting for a bus, how splendid are those clouds, the birds?  Don’t drop the plates and don’t miss the bus; that wouldn’t be your full attention, but if you haven’t noticed the water or the clouds then you weren’t giving it your full attention either.

Live now, for it is the only time you can.  Enjoy the journey.  The journey may be all there is.

A theme that has cropped up many times, in relation to learning to live in the moment, is the idea of achieving freedom from past memories.  People often find that the memories of past events affect them so profoundly that they feel restrained in one way or another by their past.  Regardless of the wording that is used, it is of course the memory that is the problem, the event does not exist in this moment.  This is a vital fact to realising.  People will often believe that the event is the problem and if they think this way, they face a huge problem because they can’t change the event.  That would be impossible.  Once they realise that the problem is the memory of the event, they have already changed the nature of their problem into one that exists in this moment and therefore has become something that they can address.  The impossible becomes immediately possible.

I should point out that some of the ideas in this article will have been mentioned in other articles.  In part, this is to ensure that the article stands alone in the event that someone reads it in isolation, and partly, because some nails need to be hammered several times for them to be driven in.  So, if you think to yourself, have I read this before?  The answer is, yes, probably, but do you think you really know it yet?

Let’s start by reminding ourselves of a few things about memory, then we’ll think about how to change them.

Memories are stored with their emotional content.  The emotion is like the tag on the file that enables you to find it in the filing cabinet of your brain.  Without that tag sticking up, the file would be simply lost amongst the other uninteresting stuff. 

Next, you need to understand that a memory is not a very accurate recording of events. First, it is only the stuff that was presented to your conscious attention; very little information.  Of the vast amount of data that comes into your brain, only a tiny fraction (we are talking billionths) is presented to your conscious mind.  Picture this as a huge photograph blown up to 12 by 8 feet, of a complex scene, and it is all very out of focus but for a square inch.  That is what our perception of the world around us is really like.  Ask any policeman about the problem of finding even two witness statements that agree about the same event.  During the event, as it occurred, you were also reminded about other memories of previous events, which also then became associated with the new event memory thereafter and you may not realize that you have dropped in details of previous events.  This is especially true when strong emotions are involved.

Then consider that when you remember something, your current emotions and conscious environment are part of the remembering experience.  The next time you recall the same event, your memory will include to a greater or lesser extent the added features of your previous remembering experience.  This can include suggested details.  So, for example, let’s say you recount for the first time a car accident that you recently experienced.  Someone says, innocently ‘I bet the squeak of breaks was loud’ and you imagine the sound of squeaking breaks.  On the next occasion when you recall the accident, you genuinely remember the squeaking breaks as part of the memory.  Recalling an event is like opening a document on your computer, as you read it you can make annotations or subtle changes and when you close it, it automatically saves the changes.  When you open it the next time, the previous changes are now included.  However, with a memory these annotations could be the emotions that you felt as you recalled it, so they get added to the memory.

Once you get how this all works it becomes possible to see how you could change your memories and more importantly, how they emotionally affect you now.

If your imagined additions or changes can be added to the memory, then how about using that to work for us?  Let me sketch out an example to demonstrate this method. (To add to those mentioned in other articles) If you decide to use this method for yourself, I would recommend getting a friend to read through this, discuss it together and then having them help you work through it, step by step.  It is entirely possible to do this on your own, but doing it  with someone else is preferable. 

Suppose you have a memory from childhood and an event when you were very upset, but no one comforted you.  This event has stayed with you, as a deep-seated and limiting belief that somehow you are on your own and no one will help you when you are in need.

You recall being curled up, on your own, crying, possibly in your room.  Now, instead of remembering this as it was, let’s change the details.  Move your point of observation to outside of the child that was you.  Be your current, grown up self looking at your childhood self crying.  Now, imagine, as a grown up, you go to this child, sit down, put an arm around them and comfort them the way they need.  Hold them until they feel better.  Tell them how everything is going to turn out OK, talk to them not just as any adult, but as an adult who genuinely knows their future.  When the child is more relaxed and has passed through the distress you can tell them that you’ll be watching over them.  The next time you try to recall this event, all the new details will be added along with the emotions involved, specifically the sense of being cared for and comforted.

If you do this process deliberately, it is unlikely that you will actually fool yourself into believing that when you were a child, this strange adult appeared in your room and comforted you, because you will also remember intending to do this.  However, you will find that your emotional response to the event has changed.

An important aspect of this process is to talk about these emotions to someone as this is part of the processing required to be free of any emotional energy left from a traumatic event.  This is why it is often better to follow this sort of procedure with someone who can walk you through it.  Be careful when choosing a buddy or coach for this sort of process, make sure they understand it.  I have come across people who will hear a traumatic story and actually encourage you in the telling, in such a way that the changes made to the memory actually make its emotional content worse.

Talking can set you free

Assuming you have someone who understands this process.  I’ll explain why talking aloud makes a difference and I’ll include an element of Eastern mysticism that might help.  For those unfamiliar with how I use these ideas, let me quickly explain.  Whether you are looking at the Kabbalah tree of life, the Indian Chakras or the interaction of the Dan Tiens (Tan Diens – Japan) and the flow of Chi you are looking at a map.  The map does not have to be an analogue of the reality it represents.  I find it amazing how many people will dismiss such maps as primitive mystical, but quite happily use the London Underground Map without complaint that the real railway lines aren’t yellow, red or whatever.  They use a pie chart, bar graph or flow chart without problem, but take issue with the Ba-Gua, or the Sheng and Ke cycles.

So when I refer to the fifth energy centre or throat chakra, I am not implying that inside your throat is a swirling energy vortex of sky blue light.  You can, if you like, see the chakras as a way of understanding historic cultural development, or a flowchart of personal spiritual development, or indeed a map of the interrelationships of emotional, intellectual and physiological systems.  I have written in greater length about this system and recommend referring back if you are not familiar with my approach.

Once you get that our emotions, as we experience them, are mostly the physiological effect of an unconscious reaction to a, usually, conscious consideration, they start to make more sense.  So, if asked to describe any emotion, we tend to offer the physiological symptoms as we become aware of them.  We might talk about butterflies in the stomach, shaking legs, a full bladder, nausea, heat in the cheeks, etc etc.  All of these are the physical symptoms of unconscious chemical/hormonal responses to various things/situations that we are, usually, consciously aware of.

(I say ‘usually’ because it is possible for us to unconsciously respond to some stimulus and then we get an emotional reaction that we can’t explain. E.g. A smell might trigger a memory that has an associated emotion, where the memory is not accessible to your conscious mind.  So the process might be hidden from you and all you are aware of is that the smell of tar makes you angry, or the rustle of tissue paper makes you excited.  You might not even realize that the smell or sound was the trigger and you are confused by an apparently reasonless emotion.)

Now the throat energy centre is all about the verbal sharing of emotions.  It is about letting emotional energy flow.  Like water, that if left still becomes stagnant, emotional energy that is stored becomes toxic and stinks.  The throat is the tap.

If ever you have needed to express a strong emotion, but you held it in, your throat hurt.  This is often when the expression would involve crying and we were in a situation where we simply were not prepared to do that, perhaps because we would feel embarrassed or week, or it simply was not the appropriate time and we had responsibilities that had to be fulfilled. If you have held a strong emotion in for a long time without expressing it, you will have found that it didn’t lose any of its power.  Only when you began talking about the event/situation did you have the full physiological reaction.  I’ve seen people share a traumatic experience, that happened decades before, suddenly burst into tears and shake for the first time.  Their reaction was as if the event had just occurred.  What happened? The speaking allowed them to begin processing it.  The first time you talk about an issue, will be the first time you have heard about it, and hearing is different from thinking quietly.  You might be surprised at your reaction to things and you might suddenly see things differently and find answers that were hidden before.  This is essential for you to begin to resolve your trauma and move on.  Sometimes, though not always, speaking about the issue can be sufficient, on its own, to process your emotional memory and leave it behind.  This is also why so often therapists get great results, merely by giving clients the opportunity to talk about their significant past experiences.  Of course, while talking might be all that is necessary for some issues to be resolved, for other issues it is only the beginning of resolution, but it is a vital and necessary beginning.

A word of warning worth repeating.  If you repeatedly talk about a past trauma without the intent of changing your emotional response, it is possible to simply add more upset to the memory with each recounting; as I mentioned above about the plasticity of memory and how they can be changed with each recollection.  A good therapist will encourage a full emotional response to a trauma when it is first recounted, but then begin to work on changing the way that memory is stored; changing its emotional content. In many situations it doesn’t even matter whom you talk to.  Friends are cheaper than therapists, but not all friends know how to listen.  Your dog or your God, in so far as releasing your suppressed emotions are concerned, can be just as effective.  But writing a journal won’t work unless you talk out loud while writing.

Enlightenment through Koans, just join the dots and a picture emerges.

A Koan is a story or a question that encourages the listener to reframe their view of reality; see things from a different angle.

I often found such devices incredibly useful when teaching high school students.  The idea is to shake their paradigm so that they can begin to see that it is just that, a way of seeing, a stage if you like, with all its props and back drops in place to enable them to maintain a particular view of how the universe is.  There is a plethora of objective facts out there, but we can’t use them.  We need just enough dots to join together into a picture that we can deal with; if you have too many dots, you can’t see anything but dots and no picture emerges.  So the mind ignores all those dots it can’t join into the picture it expects to see.  The koans create a doubt in the adequacy of our perception to apprehend reality without it being passed through the filters of our language and logic.

An ancient Taoist Master told his disciples how he awoke from a lucid dream and explained to them that he had dreamt he was a butterfly.  The koan he offered them was “How do I know I’m a man who dreamt he was a butterfly rather that a butterfly dreaming he is a man”?  Descartes offered a similar problem with the thought that he could be an ephemeral spirit in a vacuum being fed the sensations of this apparent life, by a malicious demon.  Philosophers by the middle of the last century wondered if a brain could be kept alive in a vat, plugged into a super computer, being fed a data set of a virtual world.  Nagel wondered if we could know what it was like to be a bat.  And of course, film makers had a lot of fun with The Matrix series.  All these stories offer the same thought experiment, creating doubt in the adequacy of our perception to apprehend objective reality.  One can always fall back on denying the problem, it has its own psychological force field that repels us, makes us want to step aside from it, as if our magnetic north pushes against the north end of the problem and we simple want to avoid it.  But if one is brave enough to; if one presses one’s mind hard against an impenetrable koan, then like a word repeated until meaningless, the surface meaning of the language slips away, logic tilts and the doubt may suddenly coalesce, and the habitual mental constructs, by means of which you have been fabricating the world you thought existed as a fixed objective fact independent of your mind, becomes in an instant evident, and you realise something breathtakingly fresh about the way the world exists.  That is, you know almost nothing, and what you think you know, is merely your perception.

So, existence is a ridiculously large number of dots.  Dots empty of meaning.  We, the observer, select which dots to notice and then draw the lines that construct a picture we can fit to our paradigm, our preconceived view of the world.  Our culture causes some dots to be noteworthy and our karma offers us the line picture.

All phenomena are contingent (what may exist not contingently is a more religious than philosophical question) on the causes and conditions that brought them into existence, the parts that constitute them now and (this is the bit I’m concerned with here) the predisposition of the mind that perceives the phenomenon.

That predisposition is directed by our karma.  For those without the background, let me explain simply.  Karma is not fate, luck or chance or any of the silly ideas that circulate.  A simple way for those with a Western upbringing to understand karma is to see it as the continuously developing effect of our mental habits formed by our past actions of body, speech and thought.  It forces us to perceive things through the filter of our experience.  If we change our behaviour, our actions, speech and thought, then gradually our world will change; or at least the way we perceive it, which is actually the same thing.  If we act honourably or virtuously the world becomes a more beautiful place to us as our habit of thought creates appropriate expectations in line with our thinking and the picture we expect to see emerges from the available dots.  If we act cruelly or selfishly, the world similarly becomes uglier.  If you are constantly looking for ways to con and defraud others, you will assume they are doing the same and be constantly alert for it.  What a sad paranoid existence.

No phenomenon has an objective real nature that is not contingent upon the karma of the observer.

We see a tiny part of the visible light spectrum; we hear a tiny part of the available sounds.  We can’t see the microwaves, the radio waves, the x rays, Wi-Fi or the ultra violet.  We can’t hear the sounds that dogs, bats or elephants can, I can’t even hear the stuff teenagers can.  If we didn’t have hearing, we wouldn’t even know there was stuff to hear or not hear.  What are the senses that we don’t even know we don’t have?  Why can’t I feel the magnetic patterns of the Earth and other people?  Why can’t I see the energy fields that all living things have around them?

My wife just commented on the terrible smell of incense in my office (Palo Santo I think it is called) which is odd because I was just thinking what a nice smell.  Is it a different smell we are smelling?  My wife has a peculiar ability; she sees slightly different colours with each eye.  One eye puts a green/blue tint on the world and the other a pink/orange tint.  Each perception can only be measured relative to each other and I have no idea how what I see compares to either of her eyes, or to anyone else’s of course.

Some examples

A Bottle

A group of friends are on a road trip crossing a vast dry wasteland, in Colorado or Nevada perhaps.  The foot well in the front of the car is full of supplies and to get at the bag of nuts near the bottom of this jumble of stuff, the young lady in the front props a bottle of juice on the dash for a moment.  The bottle wobbles, she reaches for it with hands full of snacks and it gets knocked out of the window.  Though she swears in exasperation, the other friends laugh; they have plenty after all, and in a moment she laughs too.  The girl in the back sees the bottle flying backwards as it passes her window and disappears behind them.  There’s a guy at the roadside, down on his luck, who had been trying to hitch a lift, and who was only a few sips of fluid away from organ failure.  He sees the bottle flying forwards, though loosing speed relative to the car it fell from.  As it is several hours before a couple in a motor home stop to give him a lift and a welcome break from the sun, the bottle almost certainly saves his life.

A Compliment

She had been a division manager in this dead-end department in a faceless corporation for nearly twenty years.  The technology and interior design concepts had changed and the open plan area had become a labyrinth of cardboard cubicles in which hopeless young fools came and went, serving their time like battery chickens.  This morning an annoyingly cocky young idiot tried his sycophancy on her, “Nice dress Mrs. P.”  She had no idea yet what he wanted from her, but if he thought he could butter her up with flattery, he was in for a shock; whatever the request he put in later was for, she’d knock it back.

He’d been thrilled to get this highly prestigious position.  As all other departments related to this one, he’d be well placed to hear of any promotions anywhere in the world.  The advantage of working for such a huge multinational corporation was the endless career possibilities.  After starting in the basement with only artificial lighting, he loved the expanse of daylight that flooded around the high ceilings.  Giving each person a cubicle so they had privacy and didn’t feel overlooked, made the working environment perfect.  He thought Mrs. P looked more depressed than usual, so automatically, as was his nature, looked for something nice to say that wasn‘t too personal and inappropriate, from someone his age.  He thought about the things he knew his mother would like to hear.  Mrs. Ps dress was notably better than the drab stuff she normally wore and actually made her look years younger.  “Nice dress Mrs. P” he said, and assumed she’d feel cheered up, then without another thought, got to his work station.

There is a story of a sword master who had been instructing his students on how to use  a combination of good technique & speed to beat a stronger opponent, to use speed & strength to beat a more skilled opponent and technique & strength to beat a faster opponent.  One student asked the master, “But what if you faced a man who was faster, stronger and more skilled than you”?  The master raised an eyebrow as if the thought had never occurred to him and replied simply, “I’d cut his head off for being a damned liar”.

Every one of us experiences the universe from an unique angle dependent on our paradigm, karma etc.  I can only see the view from here and you can only see the view from there.  I only see what my language, logic and past experiences predispose me to see.  In the vast array of dots, I join together the ones that create a picture that I anticipate, all be it unconsciously.  Occasionally I experience a Gestalt switch and the beautiful young girl becomes an ugly hag, or vice versa (If that makes no sense, Google it) but mostly I’m stuck inside my own paradigm; the way I see it. Enlightenment begins when you can understand that there are as many views of the universe as there are people to observe and none of them are more than subjective interpretations.  Ultimately, we can hope to raise our viewpoint until we see from many angles.

We can’t not have a tint to our glasses.  But we can be aware that there is a tint and we can understand that others have a different tint.  We can, given time and deliberate effort, learn how to choose the tint that we see everything through.

There are generally two elements to consider.  What is the right thing to do and how do you develop the emotional control to do the right thing?  I shall be focussing here on the first part of this question.

Unless you are comfortably sitting in a government committee meeting deciding whether to use military intervention, you are most likely to need a decision made on your use of violence in less time than it takes to blink.  This is why you need, not only, a general principal to work with, but also to have considered a number of scenarios in advance, so that your application of your general principal can be considered.  If you consider a scenario imaginatively enough, with your response worked through, it becomes part of your memories and experiences.  This enables you to act fast in the future if a similar situation arises.

The result of not doing this can leave you worrying after an event whether your actions were right.  You may suffer guilt that you should have done something, or that you shouldn’t.  Worse, indecision at the time could render you unable to act at all, frozen in what is sometimes call analysis paralysis.

 If you don’t have some mastery over your emotions, your moral choice could be irrelevant as you either freeze in fear, or become too violent from anger.

By the way, in case you weren’t familiar with the terms, Ethics is the study of principal and theory about right and wrong, while Morality relates to the practical behaviour based on such theory.  However, the terms are often used synonymously.

 While I don’t want to write a book on ethical theory, some consideration of how you should behave is relevant here.  If all you learn from training in Kung Fu is how to fight, we might as well have just sold you a gun.  A real master makes those around feel safer for his/her presence. 

Every increase in power must be accompanied by a proportionate increase in integrity.

Let us consider how you might arrive at an ethical system.  Bear in mind that most people have several ethical systems running simultaneously and this can be fine unless the systems offer different outcomes and then you have yourself a moral dilemma.  It is likely that you make some moral decisions based on traditional religious views that are so culturally ingrained that you have not considered where they came from.  You may continue to hold these morals even though you don’t believe in the religion yourself.  Such views are very resistant to change as they form part of the very structure of the universe for us and make us very uncomfortable to even consider questioning them.

Let me summarise most ethical theories for you.  As you enact a moral choice you are likely to be considering either the past or the future.  You may be referring to a rule laid down in the past, or considering the outcome in the future.

A Deontological Ethical system (deon meaning duty) is code based.  You could have been given a set of commandments or rules.  These are usually hierarchical or put in an order of preference to avoid contradictions, for example if telling the truth will get an innocent person killed, then it might be morally right to lie.  Action is therefore predetermined as moral or immoral.  This way of thinking takes away the anxiety of making a decision as, for most situations, the decision is already made and is set out in a rule.

A Teleological Ethical system (teleos meaning goal) looks to the likely consequences of your actions to determine if they are right or wrong.  When you get to the event you make the decision based on your best guess.  And there is the problem; you cannot foresee all outcomes.  These systems vary, mainly, by the criteria by which you are judging the outcome.  For example, are you aiming to do the thing that produces the most loving consequence, the most happiness, contentment, prosperity or converts to a religion?  A more sophisticated version of this asks, what would be the consequences if my considered action were universalised, i.e. would I want to live in a world where everyone did what I’m about to do?  The simple, and almost universal, version of this is simply to ask, would I like this done to me, or if you find it hurtful, don’t do it to other or treat others as you’d like to be treated.  This is asking you to consider the outcome and to prioritise other’s feelings as equal to your own.  This gives us a sliding scale of personal responsibility from an injunction to do no harm, through, do good when presented with the opportunity, all the way to deliberately look for opportunity to do as much good as you can.

Most law has to work on the basis of pre-decided rules, even if the rule is intended to produce a particular outcome.

Most of us, most of the time, use a combination of such systems.  We might use a written code to choose a desired outcome even if we can’t follow the letter of the law, but what we might consider to be the spirit of the law. 

A major problem is caused by people using a law intended for good to cause harm.  Also, people get very upset when they intend to cause one consequence but the actual outcome is quite different or even the opposite. 

If you are a professional in a legal system, one of the biggest headaches you will encounter is determining people’s intention.  You could forgive a poorly considered act if the person’s intended outcome was sound, or at the very least their intention might be considered in mitigation.  But I am not writing about legal systems here.

In this, I am aiming to help you develop your own moral compass rather than suggest a system to judge all moral choices of all people.  I want you to be able to evaluate your own moral choices and be comfortable with them, both before and after you act.  This will help you avoid prolonged hesitation or guilt and self-recriminations. 

You are not a computer with perfect knowledge of everyone’s intentions, or of every potential future outcome.  This makes ethics much more like an art than a science.  But all arts require practice and can be done with more or less skill.

It seems self-evident to me that you should judge yourself by your intentions, you know your own intentions even when you don’t know another’s.  While it is natural to consider your own interests and those of your loved one’s as priorities, don’t let those interests be at the expense of others.  Give all people equal consideration.  Remember the ‘all people’ includes you.  If you can do no more, at least do no harm.  Remember that doing deliberate good or deliberate bad for or to others will ultimately benefit or injure you, affecting your psychological development in a way that will determine whether you have any joy and contentment in life.  If, to protect some from the deliberate actions of others, you have to harm those others, do the least harm, but remember that your actions in doing so are the consequences of their choices and intentions.  These are axioms, meaning I can’t and don’t intend to prove their validity.  However, I think you will find that if you try to construct arguments against them, you will find that you feel uncomfortable in the effort and have to question yourself as to why you would even want to.

One of the greatest difficulties in developing your own moral compass will be in finding that you are out of step with your own culture.  “When they see you dancing to music they can’t hear, they will think you mad.”  It can take more courage and strength to be go against the cultural flow than merely doing what you think is right.  We are herd animals and crave, at a very deep level, the sense of fitting in and being accepted by our tribe.

A word about pacifism.  As a high principle, being a pacifist always sounds very altruistic; the idea that even in the face of personal attack one would offer no violent response.  I’ve even heard martial artists say that they would only use defensive techniques.  Strategically that doesn’t work.  If you only blocked incoming blows, all you do is postpone your defeat.  If you want to win or more importantly, not loose, you will have to use an attacking technique.  If you want to inflict the minimum harm and you have the necessary skill, you can deliver a strike that will render your attacker unconscious or temporarily unable to continue.  Trust me, that takes a lot more skill than simply disabling or killing your opponent.  Hence, the more altruistic you want to be, the more passive you want to be, the more skilful you need to be.

The other problem with being totally passive is that evil prospers when good men stand by and do nothing.  Should you intervene to stop another being hurt or killed?  If you do nothing to stop evil, when you are able to, you might be reasonably considered a collaborator; perhaps not as guilty as the perpetrator, but certainly partially responsible.  Protecting yourself is Self-Defence.  Protecting others is to be a true Warrior.

I mentioned earlier that you can visualise scenarios so clearly that they become an experience in their own right.  If you watch the news, read novels, listen to stories etc, you will find that there are many opportunities to consider scenarios where you have the chance to consider how you should and would respond.  Practice the thought process for every situation that you hear about and aim to reach clarity as to your own intentions in any situation.

What is often the harder aspect of acting morally is not the theoretical response that you think you would like to have, but the very practical response of your emotions.  Anger can cause you to react with too much violence, fear can cause you to freeze.

Both anger and fear are reasonable, rational and all too human reactions to many situations.  Over the weeks and months of this program, we will look at how you can learn to control and focus your emotional reactions in a way that will enable you to respond in a way of your choice, not entirely dictated by your physical emotional reaction.

When the rhinoceros was first described to Europeans it was almost certainly from the accounts of sailors who returned with stories of the animal.   Even so, they probably first saw only dead examples at trading stations and ports.  What did they report?  Stories of an animal as big as a horse, but stronger, with a single horn in the middle of its head and untameable.  The legend of the Unicorn was created.  Until only recently, there was more information about the beautiful and mythical unicorn than there was about the ugly rhino.  It is an uncomfortable truth, but we would rather our stories were beautiful, fabulous and mythical than ugly and true.

Over the years many martial arts have gone through a similar transformation.  The Roman father would teach his son that it was “a sweet and seemly thing to die for your country” even though the average Roman battle field was far from “sweet and seemly.”  The smell of terrified sweating men slipping in blood and ripped out intestines.  The sound of agonised screaming, pitiful whimpering and men crying for their mothers is not really the image to inspire the young to go and die to make a few aristocrats a bit richer.  Wars throughout history have received a similar literary treatment.  Glorious in the telling, brutal in the realisation.  

I have seen and been taught some beautiful martial art forms (patterns/kata) only to discovered that the movements involved are so far from their practical application that they are like comparing the Unicorn to the Rhinoceros.   Learning the form becomes totally disconnected from learning the techniques.  One starts a lesson learning an elegant series of movements that are the unicorn of martial arts.  Then, when you break down the form into its individual parts and try to apply each technique, you find that you have to do each movement so different (rhino like) that you end up learning two versions of the same technique, one that is pretty and one that works.  The problem with this is that it is often the form version of the technique that you learn automatically, or unconsciously and therefore the one you will use in the stressful situation of a real fight.  At its worse, you can have movements in a form that no one now even knows how they might work in a fight, they are just there like some strange choreography.  At some point in the past, some master included a technique in a form to help teach his students to use it within the context of other techniques, but time and the martial arts version of Chinese whispers has reduced the technique to a meaningless pretty flourish of the hands.  This is why every technique in every form of Tao Te Kung Fu should be performed exactly as it is to be used in real life.  Don’t be tempted to embellish or change a technique to make it more beautiful or complicated for the sake of appearance or to make a form appear more elegant, it won’t do you any favours when you need it to save your life.

Now ask yourself which warning is more effective on a security fence.

“Keep out. Rhinoceros loose in this field.” or “Beware of the Unicorn”

Truth is like a jewel you find in the mud, you might not be looking for it, you might not have known what it would look like, but when you find it, it stands out for what it is.

Much of what we do at Kung Fu Living is based around our philosophical approach, so it seems appropriate to share a thought or two about that.

It is our belief that Kung Fu should never be reduced to something as trivial as fighting skills.
Kung Fu really means achieving excellence through hard work or discipline.  It is about becoming a master of the art of living.

For some, from many different martial arts backgrounds, this blog may appear to be out of place.  There are many martial arts in which the fighting skills are preeminent or indeed all they learn.  For many, training in Kung Fu is a way to get fitter, stronger and more supple, a way to develop confidence by having the ability to defend themselves in dangerous situations, or just a fun skill to learn.  Obviously, it is all of those things, but if that is all you get from Kung Fu, it would be like thinking of a meal with friends as merely an opportunity to eat.  You would, I believe, be missing the heart of it.
For us and many others, martial arts training is so much more; it becomes an integral part of your way of life, an aspect of your identity.  For some, it becomes a spiritual discipline, a journey of self-development and self-realisation.

Kung Fu Living is for those people who want to discover The Way of The Warrior as a spiritual journey; a path to self-fulfilment.

The Contemplations in every day of the program are intended to be axiomatic.  An axiom is a truth that I may not be able to prove, but if I share it with you, you’ll be able to see that it must be the case; it is self-evident.  We often use such a way of thinking when it comes to rights.  I can’t prove that we should have, or grant others with, any particular right; I can only state that it seems to me that people should have this or that right, and if you can’t see it, I have nothing to fall back on.  We are all stumped when someone asks ‘why?’ to what we consider obvious; ‘Why should we try to be fair?’  ‘Why can’t I kill him?’  We can gape like a fish and bluster ‘are you serious?’ but if someone holds out, pretending that they can’t ‘just see it’ we struggle to know where to start.  If they really can’t see it, we will tend to conclude that they are psychopathic, that there is something wrong with their brain.  Indeed, such a person would be dangerous and probably will be locked up eventually.

In eastern philosophy the skill of the sage or Sifu is not so much in seeing the meaning of life, but in being able to show it to someone else in a way that enables them to say ‘oh yes, it’s obvious now you’ve put it like that.’

My hope is that as you follow this program you will often think, ‘well yes, I think I always knew that.’