Dancing Dragons

photo by Christophe Schmid (Photoxpress)

I am not a martial artist. In fact, I am a frustrated one. Just like many kids of my generation, I lived my fantasies in many movies and Japanese TV shows called tokusatsu, which mostly feature a super sentai , a squadron of heroes in colorful cyborg-like costumes fighting crimes and monsters using weapons and hand to hand combat. As a teenager, I long to be someone like Jackie Chan, Jet Li or Chow Yun Fat. I love to see their seemingly paradoxical stunts, gentle moves with forceful strikes. I had this longing much stronger after an encounter with a boy's gang who almost hit me on my head. Because of this, I wanted to be "the deadly man" on the streets, so nobody can dare to harm me.

But this thought of becoming ruthless and deadly has become feeble, since I have been much more resonant with the characters of a wise sage in many movies and stories, such as Yoda in Star Wars. Commonly, this character exudes an extraordinarily calm demeanor while teaching a brazen apprentice. Then, in times of distress, he exhibits his skillfulness in combat no villain can match. Yet he remains alert, focused, and serene like an unperturbed pond. What makes this master a powerful yet tranquil force? Why do they learn something that harms another yet be so much at peace with their skill? Pacifist by nature, I haven't had any street fights with anyone (the worst perhaps was my verbal attacks and some mischievous actions against a high school classmate) I always have faith in peace, yet I still have this archetypal yearning of gaining some mastery in martial arts. It was certainly a koan of sorts, for the paradox of peace and war is present in this very yearning.

Then, like a swift blow in my mind, a sudden insight came. The sages, both in ancient history and in fictional depictions, are not masters of martial arts. They are, in truth, masters of mental arts. During their warring era, they have developed skillful ways in living through their war-torn society. They have learned the arts not to harm others. They keep their inner awareness that everything is in harmony, and their fighting skills are actually to restore the balance and harmony of the universe.I know that most martial artists would disagree, since evil, war, violence and hostility are all present in our society, and that we must develop self-defense in order to keep ourselves safe from any attack. Yet, from the perspective of peace, we need not to defend ourselves. No one attacks us but ourselves. Our true enemy is our fear and anger within. So this is not just self-defense. In spite of these negative forces, we still become aware of the peace within us, of choosing it and becoming the source of it. This is how a real master thinks and feels.

"Dancing dragons face death squarely in a total surrender not to their enemies, but to the harmony of Life. They pass through this difficult test of their experience, attaining the insight that they and their enemies are all but one being."

In so doing, the masters of the arts do not just box, kick, or kill anyone to survive. They have acquired the movement of animals, such as how the crane spreads its wings, how the mantis prays, how the snake slithers, how the tiger leaps. They have imitated the flowing of water, the swaying of bamboo, the falling of leaves. They have learned this great harmonic dance of the Universe, bearing the tremendous strength and nonviolent spirit, and therefore have become the dancing dragons.

As these dancing dragons fight, they neither harm nor kill for the sake of their lives or for bloating their egos. Unless they do so, they cannot master the art. For each move, blow, kick against the attacker is not done with anger nor with fear. It is the way they dance in the rhythm of violence and war that tears apart the sense of Oneness. As their enemies rip off peace, these dragons mend them back together. They face death squarely in a total surrender not to their enemies, but to the harmony of Life. They pass through this difficult test of their experience, attaining the insight that they and their enemies are all but one being.

A friend who is a long-time martial artist told me that sakura, or cherry blossom, a pink flower tree indigenous in Japan, is a common symbol for a samurai, or an ancient Japanese swordsman. Quite contrary to a seemingly macho image of a warrior. But as the symbol speaks for feminine beauty, gentleness, and evanescence of Life, a samurai embodies and reminds himself to see that all around him is pristine and peaceful; that no matter how violent his life may be, he wields his sword not to kill but to see honor and compassion all one with the Universe. This is the mind of a dancing dragon.

To master the dance of the dragons is not about gaining physical power over a weakling, nor about destroying an enemy. It is about seeing that both the weakling and the enemy are partners of the dragon's soul as they dance together in the music of spheres and savagery. They all dance together as they sense their profound connections, the truth that they are not separate.

A martial art known as aikido directly embodies this principle. It literally means "the way of joining with the spirit." It seeks not to be harmed nor harm anyone, but to find peace in the midst of war. A stark paradox, indeed, yet a truth worth understanding. So the nature of martial arts is beyond the literal concept of fighting, yet it is about doing things and treating people. It echoes what Mr. Han (Jackie Chan's character in Karate Kid remake) said to his young student: "Everything is kung fu." The word kung fu applies to all martial arts, as long as we choose to see it that way. Eating, working, sleeping, talking, walking, and almost all verbs that nourish Life can lead us to the essence of the art.
We can be dancing dragons ourselves. To be one is to sustain an awareness that we are all One, that we don't have an enemy. As we dance with anger and fear, we master this art that teaches us to Love those who injure us. As another friend puts it, through martial arts we are led to get deeper in the gentle yet strong force of Love, and move in concomitance with its energy. As you get better and better, you get kinder and kinder. As a mastery of all mastery, Love is the very core of what the true masters have achieved.

Virtual Illusions

(conclusion)

I can't help but be overwhelmed by the power of media and information technology in persuading people to believe that their picture of reality is the basis of Life. The advent of broadcasting and filmmaking has revolutionized the way we view the world. The magic of our boob tubes and silver screens continue to shape our perceptions about how to live our lives, from handling money to keeping relationships, from denying truths to perpetuating lies. They have shown us many ways to entertain ourselves and escape from the harsh reality of our routines. We have witnessed great stories, have seen the world in an all-seeing eye, flashing kaleidoscopic scenes before our eyes. This power has gone from analog to digital, when the internet has offered us not just the opportunity to watch, but to have full autonomy upon it, making us to choose whatever we want to watch, to control, or to create one.

This power has brought us tremendous possibilities in terms of connecting the whole world, and horrible phantasms that delude us from discovering our true nature. How to wield this power is a matter of concern. Our fear-based tendencies will force us to wallow in this virtual illusion, or to begin arising from the consciousness of Love that interconnects us into Oneness.

I'm using media and internet as examples of virtual illusions, of fantasies we keep on craving and believing as the only reality there is. I am not saying that the technology is bad; after all, nothing is really bad. The point, however, is our way of using it. If this ground of autonomy and power causes us to isolate and cut off ourselves from each other, then we reap the consequence of alienation and indifference. These technologies are not just result of ingenuity of science. They are symbolic tangibility of our own collective consciousness. Our beliefs, desires, dreams, goals, idealogies, rules, and ethos are all interwoven in the tapestry of our outer illusions, concealing the inner knowing of our Soul. We have kept on veiling the truth by maintaining the unyielding status quo that the reality outside is the only truth, and be oblivious to the invisible intelligence that permeates the whole Universe.

In this light, we can see that our desire to gain full control of the erratic and unpredictable nature of Life make us desperate because we can see that every effort we exert is futile. The outside world, no matter how solid they appear to be, is an incorporeal molding that feeds our external senses. How about observing every stuff that surrounds you at this moment? Imagine how an artisan, an inventor, or a skilled worker worked on that from separate materials and supplies. Imagine how they designed it first using a blueprint, a parchment, a pen or a pencil. Imagine how everything that have thought is shaped by their minds. Imagine that those that you see as solid are everything but nothing.

In this evolutionary era of human consciousness, our challenge is to transcend the fourth universal attachment: craving for our ingrained fantasies and beliefs. These fantasies are the "matrix" that we keep in our thoughts as fixed states, such us our sense of materialism and consumerism that everything we acquire is the source of our meaning. Or perhaps those fantasies that to gain Love and respect from others, we should project ourselves based on how the society wants us to be. This process leads us to believe that this is the only truth, that we must conform to the whims of our society, as we continue to deny our inner, loving connection with ourselves, others and with the Universe. We fear that we might not belong, so we prevent at all cost not to be outcast from the tribal mind. This belief creates our consciousness and steers our destinies into rigidity and bondage.

Our young monk, afraid of their reputation as monks to be judged of defying their vows of not getting near any women, burst into anger and blamed his old companion. He has been living in that fantasy that such good monks must follow the rules, and not to follow them means humiliation. He has been living in a belief that actions such as the old monk did are embarrassing and does not fit a monk like them. What he forgot, though, is the essence of the old monk's deed. That first, the old monk did not do it to break any vows and rules he has committed to keep, but to be of service to the needy at a very fitting moment. And second, this service is an act of Love, the very essence of Zen, in which he saw his inner connection with a fellow human being, rather than be afraid of keeping a certain reputation or escaping any humiliation, even the anger that might conjure up from his young colleague. His very action can be nonconforming to their strict rules, yet his very intention conforms to the spirit of the Universe. He has able to let go of his anything, and just act right at the present moment. He does not trap himself of any consequence, and allowed himself to gain the wisdom by being compelled with the power of Love.

Therefore, as we see ourselves gaining much control over the virtual dimension of our technological reality, may we never forget to not to be succumbed by the illusion of living within its rules. We accept and honor whatever we see outside our inner spiritual realm, yet we also keep our own freedom of choosing to live with limitations of our fantasies and beliefs. We must let go of craving for material things, power, and fame alone. Nonetheless, we keep on achieving consciousness of Love as we forge our connection with our Soul, and let this force direct us into manifesting our material needs and unique expressions to contribute more to the betterment of our world.

As we let go of these universal attachment, we become more attached to the universal power within us, the indestructible power of Love.

Time Traps

(part three)

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.
--Book of Ecclesiastes

All of us are trapped in time. We are too afraid not to accomplish our schedules. We are scared not to live our lives the way we want it, since Life is really too short. So we have tried to make things that can speed up our daily concerns. We multitask, almost wanting to grow more hands than what we have. We have made things instant. We do this in a belief that we don't want to waste so much time.

We are also trapped with how we had spent time. We dread many things in our past that we want to bury them in oblivion. And we tend not to risk because we do not want the past to happen again. We don't want to suffer again from the mistakes we made. We fear that history might repeat itself, so we spend our time preventing the future to repeat our past. All of our actions are driven by the fears of the past and longings of the future. We hardly live in the present.

And how often do we fix people in our minds as if they are still the same people we happened to meet in the past? We criticize, blame, mock, and badmouth them because of the belief that they could not change for the better. And it's funny because we also do these more to ourselves.

Let's again observe the two monks. Troubled and worried, the young monk burst in anger because of two reasons. First, he felt the old monk did something bad; and second, he thought that what the old monk did might hurt them. The young monk is trapped by his illusion of time: the baggage of the past mistake, and the burden of future embarrassment.

We are often in such a mindset that drags our lives and keeps us from living in fullness. Our past baggage makes our hearts heavy, keeping all the resentments, regrets and remorse we have created out of the experiences. Thus, we often recognize them as fate and we see ourselves victims. With these fears in mind, we are so afraid that we think Life won't spare us in the future, and we continue to act as if the past might happen again. And our future becomes just a projection of our past conditioning. Life becomes stagnant in this third universal form of attachment: living in the past and the future.

Time is not some kind of a reference point, in which we only begin to play between past and future. We regret the things we did, blame others for their shortcomings, or maybe we want to repeat the wonderful memories that have left us behind. We think that we must invest on our future, avoiding troubles that we think we cannot avoid. To live this way robs us of the precious gift of the present.

Indeed, Life has its own time, which is very different from ours. We have been living our lives trapped in an illusive time that our calendars and clock show us, and we haven't really experienced what time really is. Time is a misery to someone who runs before deadlines, while it is a mystery to someone who lives his or her life moment to moment. This poses us puzzling questions: What makes time difficult to grasp? Why is it so precious? It's about time to learn more about time.

In the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes, the author (who was purportedly claimed as Solomon) contemplates on the nature of time. As you read it, it sounds like time is a matter of cycle, of repetitive events that sooner will bore us down. But as it nears the middle of the chapter, it shifts into a new way of seeing: "He [God] has made everything beautiful in his time." (Ecclesiastes 3:11) It leaves us a paradoxical view of time. Our sense of time that makes us shrink into limited deadlines would open us up to God's time, where every minute is an eternity. To do this is to allow the Now now.

This is the premise of Eckhart Tolle's famous book The Power of Now. Tolle elegantly teaches us that Now is "the precious thing there is". To be worried about past and future stops us to see the value of our Now, because this is the only time there is. Allowing the Now is to leave behind the past and future as fragments of our illusory view of life, and living the reality as it is. Letting go - detaching - of our time traps makes us more attached to the most important things in Life. And that is to Love.

Time is the word Rick Warren uses to spell Love in his book The Purpose-Driven Life. Gerald Jampolsky, author of Love is Letting Go of Fear teaches us the same thing, that "our only reality is Love." To Love is experienced neither in the past nor in the future. We can only begin Loving by appreciating that people, thing, and circumstance are all found only in God's time, in this present moment - only Now.

We are the Now that exist in this time and space. Our presence is the present we give to this Life, to the people we Love, to the purpose we live. Let not each minute be wasted on anxiety and worries of future, nor on guilt and blame of the past. Let us not be trapped by the time of our clocks and calendars. Our lifetime is far more valuable than the requirement of chronos, the time of the world. Living our life and being Love are the becoming of kairos, the time of Love. To Love is not to Love yesterday or tomorrow. To Love is to Love Now. This is the only time we have.

Writing about this topic takes my precious time. But the time I have spent is the amount of Love I am willing to express. The poet Kahlil Gibran asks us: "And is not time even as Love is, undivided and paceless?". Time and Love are both inseparable, and giving our time for Love never traps us, but brings us freedom. For whenever we spend our time in this very moment is our eternity of living in the sacred moment of Love.

Living with Strings

(part three)

Anger and fear entail the need to control. To feel angry and fearful is to seek for external power, a power that can gain others' attention towards the one who feels weak and insecure. This is a common experience for us. Being enraged and terrified, we have the tendencies to act illogically, as we attack others and protect ourselves from the illusion of danger of not being in control. And often we justify our actions like they suppose to happen for the sake of maintaining our external mandate over things, events, and people.

We are so fixated that we think that life do not change. This is one of the foremost illusions of attachment. Our attachment towards a monolithic view of life renders us unprepared for the constant and sudden uncertainty and inevitability of it. Just as how Ian Malcolm, the fictional mathematician of Michael Crichton's famous thriller Jurassic Park, sees the impossibility of running a dinosaur park smoothly based on accurate calculation of events, we must see that Life bears the same chaotic quality and remains naturally unpredictable. One plus one is not always two, as far as Life is concerned. But we seem to continue to control Life. Like a marionette puppeteer, we attach strings onto Life as if we think that we can make it move the way we want it, without bearing in mind that sooner the strings would snap anytime.

Once our smooth sailing lives jerk in ways we do not expect, instead of understanding the nature of change, we are more inclined to blame others for our problems and sufferings. We are succumbed to the devil's temptation of jumping over the cliff and waiting for angels to save us. Simply put, it's much easier to blame others and act with prejudice. We blame our enemies, government, relatives, partners, kids, authorities, and God. Ultimately, the least that we could do is to blame ourselves. So we end up treating ourselves as victims of fate.

"We are puppeteers who control Life with strings of our ego, and ironically the same strings have tied us into bondage of our own helplessness."

This is the second universal form of attachment: the need to change and control people, things and situations. Since we are so afraid or angry with many changes that we do not like, we force people to submit to our whims and manipulate the course of events in favor of our perceived security that things would always be in order as we desire it. We are puppeteers who control Life with strings of our ego, and ironically the same strings have tied us into bondage of our own helplessness. We paralyze our own freedom as we suppress the flow of change with our limited fixations.

Remember our young monk, who, compelled with his anger, blamed the old monk for his action. He felt that he had lost control when he thought his elder companion broke their rules. He forgot that on any muddy road, change is always possible. Likewise, the road of Life presents us possibilities that sometimes defy our fixated perceptions of what is right or wrong. We cannot control it, but we can go along with it. After all, Life has no rules to follow. Neither the strings of fear nor anger can control Life. Life is freedom at its best, given that we can honor and let it be.

And we can see that the need to control is like playing God: it's just impossible. We can only live like God, by allowing and non-interfering with a calm and cool attitude. We allow change to take place in the rhythm of nature and in the hearts of humankind. With this kind of consciousness, we do not anymore treat Life like a marionette. Life now becomes a kite: we allow it to fly with freedom. This is the upside of living with strings. The more we let go of our attachment, the more we become connected. In this kind of freedom, we open ourselves to Love more. As we stop fearing and hating, all the more we stop blaming and controlling. They work vice-versa. We allow anyone and anything to flow and grow. In turn, we also allow ourselves. Eventually, we will express Love with no conditions, and, finally, with no strings attached.

(to be continued)

The Raging Heart

(part two)


Some years ago, in the process of dealing with my anger, I have discovered that anger was my easiest way to react to any situation I encountered that primarily defied my own notions of order and harmony. Anger was my attempt to gain attention from people who seemed not to submit to my control, which allowed me to harness a kind of power where people around me tend to bend on their knees in fear. With anger, I felt an immense force that later transmuted into an appalling helplessness. After throwing thunderbolts of insults and curses, I was left drained and disempowered, let alone stupid of making a lot of mess out of shattered bottles and chairs I hurled in the height of my reactiveness. I felt I had done a nonsense act, which carved within me a huge void filled with remorse of wishing nothing had really happened.

What used to be my deep-seated anger is an ingrained experience of the first universal form of attachment: hating and rejecting negative emotions. It is so universal that no human being can possibly describe oneself free from this attachment. All of us experience this dark and vile force of anger that can consume us uncontrollably. Like the young monk, we hate that we hate; this is the irony that enslaves us in moments of grappling with our unruly emotional monsters.

Long before running amok, an individual who says "nagdilim ang paningin" (Filipino: the sight has darken) has harmed someone not from sound reasoning but from an overwhelming wave of anger. This is the darkness one experiences that makes him or her a dangerous offender. Whatever degree of offense, from verbal to physical violence, it is the pitch black anger that often pushes us to injure others without seeing the consequence of our actions. In the end, the same anger is not anymore directed to others but to ourselves.

"To understand that you are angry in the moment of anger and fearful in the moment of fear is an automatic enlightenment."

We cannot just sever anger from us. It is impossible. Anger is darkness in its full force, coming from this vast fear. While anger is the gravity, fear is the black hole from where it comes. To find ourselves gripped with anger is basically an expression of our fears. We have tried to refuse the existence of fear by trying to wield external power of anger. Angry people are people filled with fear, and they are seeking connections with others and with themselves. Seeing both anger and fear as a call to vulnerability and openness to Love is a unanimous teaching among all spiritual teachers and ancient sages. They are both manifestation of the same dark energy within us, the energy in which both our uncertainties and potentialities aggregate and arise.

The idea that anger and fear should not be present in our lives is illusion at its best. This illusion is our most common attachment. It locks us inside the cycle of anger towards others, then anger towards our anger, and anger towards ourselves. Our target is not to eliminate them, since they would be as pitch black as ever. The darkness they bring needs the light of our understanding. This reduces them from abysmal darkness to a mere shadow we cast. Like Peter Pan, we must begin to stitch up again our wild shadow with us so we can be at peace and return to the state where our hearts remain young and alive.

The paradox of this is to accept our anger and fear in their pure state, letting them adrift in our thoughts and feelings. To understand that you are angry in the moment of anger and fearful in the moment of fear is an automatic enlightenment. You have already cut the cords of their unwanted consequences. It is the very moment when instead of wallowing on the turbulent edges of the storm, you seek the very eye where there is peace and serenity. The first form of our universal attachment has finally been detached. And it is quite interesting that as we detach from this form, we have also successfully detached from the other 3 forms. This is the mystery of their interconnection that we are yet to discover.

(to be continued)





above photo  from PicApp