If you are one of the many who meditate daily looking for the base of your spirituality, you truly have a momentous task. To shed the day to day drudgery that modern life consists of is something most people prefer to do with copious amounts of drink and drugs at the weekends. To rid yourself of the repressed emotions hidden inside almost every one of us or even try to ignore the pull upon our actions caused by emotions and free yourself from all ties with the physical world is a daunting but wholly understandable goal. Whether you subscribe to yoga, zen, buddhist or other types of meditation such as self hypnosis it is accepted that clearing out the debris is hard work and you may only get a mere glimpse of what is underneath in your whole life. Trandescending the physical world and being so focused that you access a different reality is what people who practice meditation work towards.
It's hard to blast the hard work that people put into meditation because it is a fantastic stress reliever and most certainly helps a lot of people. The problem with meditation is that it is a solitary path to enlightenment and you certainly can't meet your mates in nirvana. This problem can be easily solved, but only if you are so inclined. And so to boxing. Well, any martial art or combat sport which includes sparring as part of its regular class really. Boxing, kick boxing, Thai boxing, wrestling, judo etc are all forms of combat sports which are built around actually striking or opposing your will upon another person as opposed to theorising the issue. What's the link? Pure being.
When you get punched in the face, you aren't thinking about work or what shopping you need to get. In fact, if you are thinking about anything like this then you are really only saying "please, hit me in the face again". No, you cannot actively think of anything. Your instincts kick in and you work from reflex. In a split second, a choice is made to either fight or fight back the tears. In seconds, you can throw back the many layers of conscious thought and feel something that those who meditate will work towards for many years. In one uncomfortable moment, you both feel nothing at all and the overwhelming experience of feeling your undiluted pure being.
Finding enlightenment in being repeatedly struck in hand to hand combat is not for everyone however. Your granny will most probably show as much interest in participating in the fistic arts as she would in wrestling bears. However, in a post Fight Club world where people ask "What Would Tyler Do?", we are more likely to accept violence into our lives if it is purported to have esoteric or artistic merit. Just as Albert Markovski and Tommy Corn found at the end of I Heart Huckabees, a sharp strike to the face produces a trandecendal experience which is hard to access without hallucinogenics, not to mention the sense of camraderie you will feel with the many other people training with you, giving and taking along side you. If you feel meditation is too lonely or it simply isn't having the benefits you hoped it would, volunteer for a punch in the chops.
We tend to attribute stellar performances in various athletic activities to a combination of inborn dispositions, psychological perseverance, and down to earth physical training. However, the inside story, from some of the world’s greatest athletes, reveals that the players themselves often see it quite differently. Many report that at the time of their peak performances they were in states that resembled mystical rapture. Their experience in the psychoid realm, such as the radical alteration of time and space, to them bordered on the miraculous. The book The Psychic Side of Sports, by Michael Murphy and Rhea White, is a gold mine of just such examples, reported by athletes in virtually every sport. Moreover, Murphy and White’s research uncovered many instances in which the extraordinary inner experiences of the athletes were matched by corresponding perceptions of the onlookers.
ReplyDeleteFootball players, race car drivers, Olympic divers, and others have described an extreme slowing of subjective time, so that they felt they had all the time in the world to perform what they had to do. Golfers, football players, ocean divers, sky divers, and mountain climbers reported drastic changes in body image; sometimes these changes were perceived by onlookers as actual changes in body shape and size. Football players have described how they seemed to have penetrated the solid wall of a defensive line by dematerialising and rematerialising on the other side. Runners felt inexhaustible source of energy and had a sense of moving without real effort and without actually touching the ground. The great soccer player Pele confided that on a day when everything was going right, he felt a strange calmness, euphoria and endless energy. He was absolutely confident that he could dribble through the opponent’s defence and pass through them physically. Scores of reliable witnesses have testified that Morehei Uyeshiba, the inventor of aikido, appeared to transcend physical laws when he demonstrated his abilities. Facing as many as six attackers with knives, which were well trained in martial arts, he appeared to change his shape and size and was able to disappear for instants, and then reappear in other places. Some of these feats are evident in a documentary movie showing his artistry; his followers swear the film was never edited or in any way tampered with, though the master at times seems to disappear before our eyes as if photographic tricks are involved. Witnesses to the actual filming reported experiencing the same miraculous events that the film recorded.
I should have put the inverted commas at the beginning of the citation from the book of Czech psychologist Stanislav Grof called The Holotropic Mind, first printed in 1990 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Holotropic-Mind-Three-Levels-Consciousness/dp/0062506595/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1287358299&sr=8-1), but hey, why not stretch things a little. The book goes into a great detail in describing the levels of unconscious mind as experienced by the author throughout his career. From spontaneous Kundalini rising during birth experienced by his wife, out of body experiences, mystical states of mind and how they are related to Freudian analysis and eastern traditions to archetypal origins of planetary experience, psychic evolution and transpersonal psychology, this book offers inspiring insights into fundamentals of human existence from the point of view of a psychologist. Excellent read.