Theos-Talk Archives (December 2006 Message tt00341)

FRIENDS, 
 
I could say I am a river man. 

I have come to live the truth of the fact that rivers have the equivalent to spiritual souls. 
 
For ten years in this lifetime,  I struggled full-time for environmental law enforcement,  and fought big  industrialists and other law trespassers in the Sinos river, in the southernmost  state of my country. That included small illegal fishing  and deforestation at  the banks of the river.  The actual presence in the area, whenever necessary, was granted by a motor boat. That was a spiritual process for me. To know each bend  of  the river and the daily  renewed subtleties of its hydrodynamics, or its fauna behaviour,  was an art and a science indeed.   
 
Heraclitus was right. No one bathes or travels twice in the same river, as the river renews itself and changes its hydrodynamics everyday --  nay, every three hours. But the one who bathes or travels also changes, because he is also a river, a small river of life along time,  as Jorge Luis Borges taught.   
 
As to the mysterious Karmic Art of enforcing law  against  trespassers and transgressors,  I would say that -- like in any martial art --  you must be in unity with your opponents,  in order to understand them.  You have to have Communion-and-Detachment with regard to trespassers.  Why and how so?  Easy. 
 
Communion will allow you to understand  them. 
 
Detachment will allow you to keep to your own duty, your methods, your love for truth, and to the humble knowledge of  your own limits. It will teach you how to manage that great “natural resource”  -- time.    
 
How can you keep detachment,  Vairagya, while you are in an intense law-enforcement struggle? 
 
If you are sufficiently ‘attached’ to your own conscience, to your sense of selfless duty and to your ‘small inner voice’, then you will not be attached  to any possible opponents (or friends, for that matter);  and you  will not need to make any conscious effort in that direction, at all. 
 
The latter idea is decisive, as conscious efforts are often self-defeating in the spiritual way, since they create corresponding “unconscious resistances”.  
 
The universe is symmetrical, and much better than “intense conscious efforts” is the  “natural way” proposed by philosophical Taoism.  This same principle  is used in Taoist martial arts  like Tai Chi Chuan.  Amidst intense action, you have to act naturally. Battlefield must be like Home to you, as it was  for Arjuna after his “discussion” with Krishna. 
 
Martial arts are not depicable things, in spite of what  some naively superficial  and  cozy descriptions of the spiritual path may try to suggest. 
 
Taoism inspired  Sun Tzu’s  “The Art of War” ,  and Zen tradition is linked to the source of more than one martial art.  Bodhidharma, the first Zen patriarch, is said to have created the Kung-Fu in Shao-Lin monastery. (1)    Zen masters teach:  
 
“Do not hate enemies if you want to conquer them.” (2) 
 
Indeed, hate --  as well as the other personal feelings --   blind  people by making them distort truth; while  one  needs to see things as clearly as one can,  if one wants to act in a correct way. 
 
Another lesson we can learn from a philosophical approach to martial arts is that  we have to be totally truthful towards ourselves as to others, while naturally keeping the right and the means,  whenever necessary, to be unpredictable to others,  to be opaque to their vision, and to know how to neutralize their aggressive actions or strategies.     
 
Why should you be truthful towards others as towards yourself?  
 
This is not a theoretical lesson on abstract levels of Ethics.  It is an practical need  which makes or breaks.  You cannot afford distorting truth either for yourself or for others. If  you lie to others in some issues,  you will lie to youself in other topics,   because mental habits work and spread their vibration  in every direction, as the sun light  does, and mental  habits cannot be made to work only in the direction one consciously chooses.  
 
That’s why it is correct for you to open some of the fundamental lines of your life  in front of friends and foes alike,  and to be sincere  to all,  as you are sincere to your Self.  This is a practical, matter-of-fact need resulting  from the long term  process of self-transformation and self-understanding. 
 
Of course there are a few people who choose the other way around,  and try to create all kinds of  tricks to avoid the Law of Harmony and Justice,  or to postpone its action. 
 
Yet  the  right and proper karma of their actions will get to them in due time,  and it will do so perhaps in the way and time they least expect ; sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually ;  but frequently with a unpredictable combination of surprise and graduality.  
 
This is actually good for them, as the best thing anyone can do at any time is to  know, to face and to cooperate with his own karma ; and to be glad and thankful for the opportunity to learn conscious lessons from it on a daily basis.   
 
Regards,  Carlos. 
 
 
NOTES: 
 
(1) “Zen For Beginners”, Judith Blackstone & Zoran Josepovic, Writers and Readers Publishing Inc., London, UK, 1986, 168 pp., see p. 35. 
 
(2) “The Iron Flute, 100 Zen Koan”, Translated and Edited by Nyogen Senzaki and Ruth McCandless, Charles E. Tuttle Co., Tohyo, Japan, 1985, 176 pp., see p. 90. 
 
ooooooooooooo


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