The Myth of Martial Arts
Martial arts in their present form have nothing to do with fighting in 80% of the cases, and nothing to do with art in even 90%. I've decided to include this topic in my blog not because of my personal attitude towards martial arts but because of the attitude of most people and the government towards education.
Martial arts are a brand the business and ruling authority need in order to control or prevent the formation of a certain discipline of the mind in people. Moreover, those who engage in these 'martial arts' do not understand what they are, and associate them with some sort of aggression.
Authentic martial arts should be linked to overcoming one's lack of perseverance and to discipline, to engaging oneself in the act of creation, rather than reinforcing one's sick fantasies about being able to defeat someone else. The essence of martial arts is related to the mind and concentration, to qualities that contemporary people do not know and cannot develop in 70% of the cases. Today martial arts have become the private creation of people who rely on their own Self, their Ego, and use the traditions as a disguise.
Today people who come to study martial arts are unable to analyse the egregore they are part of, and are thus unable to learn the technical habits that can help them attain perfection. And perfection can be achieved no earlier than in 10-15 years, and that's in case the method has been chosen correctly. And since relationships are immediately constructed on the master-disciple basis, what comes first is not the art of learning, but faith based on subordination through physical power.
It turns out that the master is not perceived as an intellectual object, but rather as a physical object, itself formed through subordination. Therefore what we have here is not a development structure but a repression structure punishing people for no particular reason. As a result at least 60% of the people suppress their will, instead of developing it even on the most elementary level. In the current living conditions, people simply cannot rationalize their own actions, they are involved in a chaotic development and do not follow methods they understand, they simply become a commodity and materialize their own yet unknown and unprocessed emotions, which are based on fear and aggression.
And no matter what garnish the martial arts use, people still see what nature has granted them in the shape of a pile. And whoever has the bigger pile, is the stronger one.
Even if someone, under the guise of lofty principles, practices, say, Taijiquan, calling it a martial art, he will be ridiculed by the representatives of the other martial arts. And this is a demonstration of the intolerant attitude of one practitioner to the other.
In fact, those who do Taijiquan as a martial art, may truly seem ridiculous since the process of building the right proportions so that the right energy currents start flowing through the body, may well need 10 years of practice. And in order to learn how to control this energy, rather than simply hide behind the mask of 'internal art', one needs another 10 years of practice.
Such attitude to martial arts has already been demonstrated by aikido, where the more intelligent people no longer find comfort in the thought that they can do something to someone (other than their disciples who are scared by their very presence). Quoting here the greatness of Ueshiba, the founder of aikido, is pointless. What he could do no longer underlies the teachings passed on to those who study aikido today.
The same applies to the followers of fearless Oyama. They failed to learn the essence of his teachings and today they entertain themselves and others by breaking parts of each others' bodies and beating out their brains. As a result they a have painful old age that starts around the age of 40. A typical example here is the marvellous representative of the kyokushinkai school from France Dominique Valera. And other types of karate are not even worth discussing.
The legend of the great Funakoshi who on his deathbed said 'I finally realized how to strike!' should not support karate but rather discourage you from undertaking it. If Funakoshi himself spent all these years fighting with strikes he did not know, what can all others do when their general concept of a strike is often reduced to 'a blow to the face!' The desire to hit someone in the face under any pretext is present in almost every ordinary teenager or man with a weak intellect. And that's all natural, it's an emotion that controls our consciousness. Therefore, we can claim that today 90% of the people who do martial arts are characterised by anger, aggression, selfishness and frustration.
The exception here is, of course, wrestling, which can be considered an art because one cannot achieve anything, not knowing the right techniques. But I wouldn't call it a martial art either, because wrestling is above all about shaping the supporting framework of one's personality, which then helps transform anger and aggression into strong will. By the way, wrestlers are truly the most intelligent people in this whole group for they do not hide behind lofty words.
There are many other 'ritual arts', which were formed in defense of the spirit. They are true arts yet only to the group of people who really understand space and believe in higher powers. Arts like the Egyptian Sebekkha, Crocodile Spirit, the one of the Peuls in Guinea, the Brazilian Capoeira, the Indian stick fighting Nilaikalakki Silambam, the Indonesian Pencak silat all rely on complex cosomogonic systems, that should be examined from various viewpoints and with a deep understadnig of the philosophy, mythology and culture of the nations that have developed these arts.
Thus the creation of the modern martial arts myth should not be confused with the cosmogonic systems of Buddhism and Taoism, which is where they presumably came from. Let the Shaolin monks continue practicing their gymnastics, kicking consciousness out of their heads. This should not be considered an art, not even a martial art. For isn't it funny when a first rate Shaolin monk boxer is defeated in three seconds? It turns out today the winner is not the one who has reached further in his development but the one who is cooler. Is this martial art? If so, we can call different killers and terrorists 'masters of martial activities'...?
04 june 2010
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