DREAMS IN THE WARRIORS WAKE | | |
The following article appeared in of The Feldenkrais Journal, Issue #2, Fall 1986. | | |
The Warrior Dreams vulnerability. The average person waits in long lines, with the mass of like others, for a vision of invulnerability. John Wayne & Rambo & Rocky & Bruce Lee triumph again and again. Again, a gain, a dominance, the idea of strength triumphing over weakness, of good over evil, of effort over ease, no pain without gain, again. For the Warrior, to be vulnerable is to be able to deploy strength or weakness, weakness in strength, strength in weakness. The very idea... | | |
Person angry with Moshe snidely asking, "How can I be a genius like you?" Moshe responding to the need and not the anger, "Find your true weakness and surrender to it. Therein lies the path to genius. Most people spend their lives using their strengths to overcome or cover up their weaknesses. Those few who use their strengths to incorporate their weaknesses, who don't divide themselves, those people are very rare. In any generation there are a few and they lead their generation." | | |
The warrior dreams a dynamic stability, an active passivity, a creative insecurity. What do you do when you don't know what to do? How do you act when you don't know how to act? To whom do you turn when there is no one to turn to? You gotta love the questions. | | |
Zen Priest: You are going into the bath tub, stark naked without a stitch of clothes on. Now a hundred enemies in armor, with bows and spears, appear all around you. How will you meet them? Will you crawl before them and beg for mercy? Will you show your warrior birth by dying in combat before them? or does a Man of the Way get some special holy grace? | | |
Samurai: Let me win without surrendering and without fighting. | | |
Test: Caught in the midst of the hundred enemies. how will you manage to win without surrendering and without fighting? | | |
The Warrior dreams of the cessation of conflict. Chih Ke, to stop the fighting. S/he gives everything over to being on the Path, to the beingness of becoming. Things that stop the average voyager are nothing to the Warrior. "Gate, gate, parasamgate, hum swaha." Sanskrit Buddhist saying meaning "Gone, gone, completely gone, praise be," but translated by the practical Chinese and Japanese as, "Going on, going on, always going on, praise the journey!" A moving target is hard to hit. Rolling stones gather no moss. | | |
