Interloper wrote:I believe just about any discipline can teach "no mind"... Athletes, artists of all kinds... when they are "in the zone," they are expressing this concept. In Japanese budo/bugei, the closest equivalent of wu wei ("no action") is mushin ("no mind"). They lead pretty much to the same thing: being able to act instantaneously, in the present and without preparatory thought. IMO, practices such as push-hands do develop this, but they seem to do so for a limited set of circumstances.
Agreed.
Chinese have the same equivalent to mushin - wu xin. Though wuji (no differentiation) later became more used as it’s the opposite of tai chi (which means that the things comes into the world by the fluctuations between opposites). Wuwei is something different, it doesn’t really mean emptiness as a state of mind. But it’s still good to start from there to understand Wuwei in action.
Trick wrote:Did it escalate into a fight? Since you had a lot on your mind in that situation as in how to do this and that, that could maybe trigger an attack. I've been in a couple of situations that also involved knifes and sticks, in where as I reflected on afterward had gone in a state of relaxed omnipresent awareness(the best I can explain it)that made me feel very calm and comfortable on a focused way and the aggressors just seemingly came to think of others things and left... I have often thought about those instances,
As I didn’t show any aggression or fear I didn’t add more fuel to the fire, and some people I met indeed just cooled down and the situation didn’t escalate. That’s true.