Teacher and 'student'- a precious relationship

[RobP2]

My experience has been that people who truly face life and death, kill or be killed situations look for meaning and travel a spiritual route or look for oblivion and travel an alcohol or similar route. The former can be valuable guides and teach us a lot about the human condition.

However - and here's where I guess we get into personal belief systems - what is viewed as "spiritual" can vary. One person may view certain practices as "demonic", another may view them as harmless. Some practices may be deemed supersitious nonsense, or as life enriching.

I see your Silat followers and raise with Chinese Boxers who deemed themselves bullet proof following their spiritual practices

[middleway]

ones that can really do the business yet insist upoun a certain way of life/ meditation-spiritual work / code of wude - do these , in any of your experiences, consistently produce more balanced , compassionate, wise individuals or just a conveyor belt of indoctrinated followers?

Personally i think the latter in the vast majority of cases.

Often the idea of insistence on certain spiritual practices or methods are given to help a student avoid the mistakes that the teacher made when he was going along his path. Personally i believe however that it is these very mistakes and traps and dead ends that make the teacher what he is ... a rounded human being. Life would be so nice if we never made mistakes, but we would never grow or learn.

These 'mistakes or dead ends' are not things to be avoided through guidance IMO, but more things to be embraced for the tough and often Harsh lessons that they provide to us. If we get stuck in a dead end .... there is always the next lifetime. ;-)

I agree that having someone to explain certain things to you is useful. I also think that having periods of intense uncertainty, lonelyness and misunderstanding are also extremely valuable in their own right. Our very own 'dark night of the soul'.

cheers
Chris

[Dmitri]

If we just replace "spiritual guidance" with "personalized psychological help", I think a lot of common ground may be found between some of the opposing POVs here.

[Bhassler]

[quote="Walk the Torque"
Sometimes it matters very little as to how a person is treated. One can afford them every courtesy, be patient, understanding, and bend over backwards to help them; but if their particular representation of the world and their interaction with it is such that they perceive someone to be a threat, or an easy mark, or even feel that the hurt they are feeling is attributable to another persons actions, then they can commit some pretty atrocious acts of violence.

To say that there is a failure on the part of the teacher is, I think, a gross underestimation of the power of a persons internal representations.
[/quote]

One person's courtesy, patience, understanding, and helpfulness may be meaningless if they're not addressing what a student is really there for. If you're talking about a person who already can fight and comes to a teacher or system that includes a spiritual practice, then already that shows they are looking for something-- in essence they are asking for change in their life. If that same student continues to have or develops issues of anger, violence, or whatever form of conflict they initiate, then it's pretty clear they're not getting what they need. So the teacher may have succeeded in a technical realm, but in a spiritual realm-- based on results-- they failed. One of the first steps in just about any sort of spiritual practice is accepting accountability for one's own life, and certainly anyone worth their salt as a spiritual teacher will feel more accountable than most for anything that happens in their lives, including their relationships with others.

[alexsuffolk]

By the way Chris, thanks for the positive words re. posting here....i have been visiting/exchanging on EF/RSF since the beginning , and always tried to write as i would speak in everyday life - which probably means periods of extreme clarity mixed with well intentioned but garbled nonsense!

[Chris McKinley]

Alex,

RE: "...how about the systems such as Shorinji Kenpo, various Silat arts and i guess even Aikido ........ones that can really do the business yet insist upoun a certain way of life/ meditation-spiritual work / code of wude - do these , in any of your experiences, consistently produce more balanced , compassionate, wise individuals or just a conveyor belt of indoctrinated followers?". Without exception, every martial art that insists upon tacking a religious or spiritual element onto the practice produces far more of the latter. In fact, more accurately, they produce a huge slew of wannabe's...neither the genuine article nor the mindlessly cultish.

This is part of why I believe such a practice, in the modern West at least, to be an anachronistic challenge at its very best, and in almost all empirical cases, a representation of dysfunctional social skills, poor self-esteem and personalities either vulnerable to an insecurity-based need for subservient special treatment on the part of the instructor, or vulnerable to escapist or cultist themes on the part of the students.

Certainly without any exceptions at all, the martial artists I've encountered who were undeniably more genuinely ethical or even spiritual people, were that way completely apart from any involvement in the martial arts, and their martial art practice contained no specific ethical or spiritual requirement beyond basic respect and courtesy while in class.

To take the larger perspective, we in the West went through similar cultural phases that included the mentor/protege relationship. Nowhere is this either as dramatically demonstrated nor as strongly preserved today as in that demographic that includes the various types of artisans. Artisans are a subset of 'artists', but their work is generally distinguished by having an objectively functional component to it. Knifemakers, horseshoers, musical instrument makers, boatmakers, etc. all fall under the term 'artisans'. While they may employ every bit as much artistic sensibility and talent in their craft as any oil painter, music composer or literature writer, their creations are generally called upon to include a functional component that must not be compromised merely for the sake of art. Among these people, the concept and practice of apprenticing under a mentor is still both fairly common and even practical.

While such relationships, especially in the past, developed into lifelong friendships, personal counseling, occasional spriritual advice, or even surrogate fathering, they generally did not start out with the assumption that such an additional dimension to the relationship was either requisite nor even likely. As a result, when a deeper relationship did develop, it tended to be more mutually consenting and therefore more genuine.

The modern West no longer has much practical need for mentor/protege relationships with regard to profession or vocation, so the practice has fallen out of favor among the culture at large. When people used to more standardized training and self-direction are presented with a cultural practice that requires them not only to enter into a mentor/protege relationship, but a hierarchical system of a higher spiritual advisor/subservient spiritual disciple, not only do they see that kind of relationship as unnecessary to the acquisition of the skill sets of that practice, but they may also be alarmed at the very significant possibility for fraud, charlatanism, sycophantism, cultishness, and exploitation that can and all too often do occur in such relationships in the modern era.

[alexsuffolk]

Very well written post Chris.

'Certainly without any exceptions at all, the martial artists I've encountered who were undeniably more genuinely ethical or even spiritual people, were that way completely apart from any involvement in the martial arts, and their martial art practice contained no specific ethical or spiritual requirement beyond basic respect and courtesy while in class.'


I would agree but with a couple of notable exceptions.

Actually if anything repulses me as much as fundamentalist Christian preachers and fake Advaita Gurus giving Satsang (how can anyone fall for those smiley charlatans????)....it is new age internal martial arts teachers espousing spiritual 'truths' which are designed to fill the class and their pockets.

The only Satsang i want to be giving is to my all-female group in Bangkok.....

[D_Glenn]

The real problem of trying to talk about these practices is really one of translations. I'm guessing here but what Alex initially called those with "Essence" is what is called 靈 'ling', meaning:spirit, soul, alert, agility, nimbleness, quick-witted, mental fortitude, or complete body and mind integration.

Another problem is the word 神 'shen' -- spirit, soul, divine essence, consciousness.

And this whole mind/body 神 'shen' is made up of:

1 - 心 神 'xin shen' : heart-mind, consciousness, often just referrred to as 心 'xin'.

2 - 意 'yi' : intention, idea, thought.

3 - 志 'zhi' : will power, determination, will.

4 - 魂 'hun' : ethereal soul, imagination.

5 - 魄 'po' : corporeal soul, primal instincts.


To avoid the problems that occur when we say the translated words of: spirit, spiritual, soul, divine, etc. what we often do is instead of saying 'spirit' (神 shen) we say 'heart' (心 xin' "put your heart into it" ), and we speak of 心意 'xinyi' or mind-thought as one without 2nd guessing ourselves. We can speak of 'willpower' (志 zhi). When we discuss the 'hun and po' we can use instead in place of 'hun' -- 'imagination or imagine the movements, visualizing in our mind's eye our practice. In place of 'po' we can discuss trusting our instincts, we all to some degree can still sense when something or someone is staring at us even from long distances.

All of these are built up with good practice and we don't have to speak of it but it's the same building up of vigor that makes people religious, I think the turning of an atheist into a religious man is possibly considered an awakening of the 魂 'hun' ethereal soul inside of ourselves.

So Martial Arts can turn some people towards standardized religions but who cares about that, start working on : Mind, Intention, Will power, Imagination, trusting our Instincts. Is it 'shen gong' (spiritual work)? Yes. Do we translate it as that? Not no but fuck no.



.

[alexsuffolk]

Nice post D Glenn

[Daniel]

Interesting thread.

As for Spiritual Martial Arts (SMA), corny though the name is since New Age took over the word Spiritual, it´s important to notice that they are different than martial arts that simply utilise psychic work (re RobP2´s post above) for combat. Sometimes both exist interwoven, but the real SMA use psychic work as part of their training to become free from the addiction to it, they don´t stay there. It´s just a hammer. You don´t have to marry it.

Without exception, every martial art that insists upon tacking a religious or spiritual element onto the practice produces far more of the latter. In fact, more accurately, they produce a huge slew of wannabe's...neither the genuine article nor the mindlessly cultish.

Quite true. However, an interesting question is whether the few real ones might not produce extraordinary results? I feel it´s important to keep that in mind, too, even though the quote itself is correct.

Certainly without any exceptions at all, the martial artists I've encountered who were undeniably more genuinely ethical or even spiritual people, were that way completely apart from any involvement in the martial arts, and their martial art practice contained no specific ethical or spiritual requirement beyond basic respect and courtesy while in class.

Again, quite true. It´s individual. However. Positing "real" versions of SMA, could it not be possible for the techniques to give a concrete framework for the practitioner to work on and release the internal demons that might have turned him to MA to begin with, but which the functionality doesn´t adress? In my experience, everybody I have met who do MA of any kind usually have an unusually large amount of internal demons. This is partly the reason to why they became interested in MA in the first place. There might be exceptions to this, even if I have yet to meet one. If someone is interested in functionality under threat or for life and death that is one thing. Once skill there is acquired, there might be other interesting paths to continue the training. Doing MA or IMA is not a panacea to making you a pleasant person to be around...or in making you a positive factor in your surroundings.

The part about mentoring that Mr. McKinley mentions is interesting. Here we might find the reason to why the SMA information itself has been diluted so much. Few want to put the time in. This of course holds true for high quality IMA and MA in general if one wants to train in a spectrum that covers both yongfa, martial functionality, long-time health, and acquiring a greater balance with one´s surroundings and one´s life. Huge amounts of complex information cannot be taught and integrated in a short time.

I train in two SMA traditions. One of them has an incredible precision to the techniques of SMA, both in how you layer them and how you use them, while the other one is more general yet very effective. They are a core part of my own training and interest. They both hold that first you become combat effective: only after that do you turn towards the more "spiritual" part of the SMA. If this is reversed, the slope instantly gets a lot slippier.

In my experience, and with the teachers and practitioners I have seen who do high quality SMA, the practical techniques in the SMA training have vastly increased their functionality for combat, while at the same time making them more whole as human beings.


D.

Sarcasm. Oh yeah, like that´ll work.

[johnwang]

I have taught someone for free in the past 10 years. Oneday I taught him one of my best moves, the "outer twist". I told him that, "I gurantee that you won't be able to learn this move from anybody else on this planet". He said, "There are a lot of good moves out there." After that day, I'll never teach anybody for free for the rest of my life. If people pay me, I'll teach him. No close relationship for me any more (I had loaned one of my students $5,000 but that student never paid me back). I like that kind of simple relationship better.

[meeks]

meeks, i didn't like that.

huh? Didn't like what? Nothing was 'aimed' at you... I'm just making comments. *scratches head*

[Michael]

I have taught someone for free in the past 10 years. Oneday I taught him one of my best moves, the "outer twist". I told him that, "I gurantee that you won't be able to learn this move from anybody else on this planet". He said, "There are a lot of good moves out there." After that day, I'll never teach anybody for free for the rest of my life. If people pay me, I'll teach him. No close relationship for me any more (I had loaned one of my students $5,000 but that student never paid me back). I like that kind of simple relationship better.

I noticed when I was (still am) a student, sometimes I would do something shitty to my teacher. There is a pressure that I felt from learning that I would try and redirect back at my teacher. Small stuff, but it was there. It's too peculiar to give an example. When I started teaching I noticed it in my students as well, both the qigong and the English. The more powerful or potent the material, the more likely for the teacher to get this negative feedback.

I was a bit surprised by many of the posts on this thread because it seemed to me those writing were unaware of this part of the teacher-student relationship. I can understand why teachers should be cautious and why some of them get burned out or become somewhat bitter, although my teachers are remarkably resilient and dedicated. As far as the original thing about challenging your teacher to a fight, I think the student was disconnected from reality and playing games. Probably too foolish for the teacher to correct it directly with a boot to the head. Eventually the guy will learn.