Yes it is important to fortify oneself on this path. People do it all the time, fortify themselves, but if ones tendency is philosophic fortification stands in the way of the visibility of the world. So we need to make for a transparent fort, so to speak - one needs to be a fortress of will.
I like Wing Chun because of all the martial arts I tried it was the most philosophically consistent with its purpose. Its main principle: if the way is free, we go forward.
For a mind which always looks in all directions, such a martial art is extremely useful.
The power of the well placed strike to launch people in the air is attained by its internal arts, the breathing in practicing the form, which must be practiced extremely slowly as well as at combat speed. Usually they don’t teach this, unfortunately. Without it Wing Chun is really just a kind of trick, not a lethal force.
At one point my sifu wasn’t there because he was giving a workshop to the Israeli army. Krav Maga takes some of Wing Chun straightforwardness but not its internal arts.
But, on the whole, if I were to recommend a system of self defence now, given the problems with getting good Wing Chun teaching, it would be the Russian military method, Systema. Purchase some DVDs from Vladimir Vasiliev and I think you’re set, especially in combination with Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which also became an interest of my Sifu. There is so much principle and logic in this art, it is inexhaustible. It is oriented on physics entirely. Completely magical, thereby. A human body which controls its own physics is a tremendous force.
It is by far the most Buddhistic martial art I know. It is completely oblivious to desire. It just deals with what is.
This relates to the balance of Tipharet. There is balance both between left and right and top and bottom - a very hard won balance. A man has to go through a lot of extremes on all sides to be able to hold the existential polarities together in his minds heart. This can only be accomplished in some form of movement; I believe the ultimate zen meditation is the fine tuning of ones physical rhythm with the motions of the Earth around the Sun and the Moon around the Earth. In all deep meditation, the body will be swaying ever so slightly. It is then easy to enhance this swaying and attain a dancing trance, like so many practitioners in the East tend to love. But the swaying does distract from the core of the concentration, which causes the nirvanic ecstasy. I like standing meditation, I like to feel my feet finding the point of most perfect balance. All power comes out of the Earth, on how we are rooted on it. To uphold the sky in samadhi requires firm footing, which in turns requires a constant soft movement, an adaption to the shift in gravity. To attune to this might be the true cause of the ananda. Why it can the attained while lying down; it has to do with upholding the body, with doing work. Doing precisely the right work, namely, maintaining balance in cosmic motion and doing nothing besides. This feels like the relinquishing of the will to power, and amounts in the enjoyment of ones full capacity. Capacity for what? Anything. That is where lasting values and true paths are born.
Saturn and Capricorn - I noticed that last year, the Suns entry into Capricorn, on the solstice, coincided with Saturns entry in Capricorn. The same day. This is a once a lifetime event, probably once in hundreds of years. The weird thing was that I discovered this looking if this was an auspicious moment to start a Saturn calendar. So thats what I did.
We are now in the first year of Saturn.
The rules of this calendar are the same as of the Jupiter calendar I had installed in 2015; the new year starts when the planet and the Sun are in first conjunction in a sign. Because Jupiter has a 12 year orbit, this amounts in years of 13 months. With Saturn the years are a little under three solar years. I am using these periods to understand and better work with the qualities present on Earth at a given time, the arcs that can be worked out.
Here is some thread I made on the Jupiter calendar if you require further information on this.
astrologyweekly.com/forum/s … p?t=110629
beforethelight.forumotion.com/t5 … r-calendar
Dogs are rarely wrong.
