More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
From this one can see that the two forces (Yin-Yang), although they appear to conflict, in reality are mutually interdependent; instead of opposition, there is cooperation and alternation.
Law of Harmony. It states that one should be in harmony with, not in rebellion against, the strength and force of the opposition.
Law of Noninterference with Nature, which teaches a gung fu man to forget about himself and follow his opponent (strength) instead of himself; he does not move ahead but responds to the fitting influence.
Alive, a man is supple, soft; In death, unbending, rigorous. All creatures, grass and trees, alive Are plastic but are pliant too, And dead, are friable and dry. Unbending rigor is the mate of death, And yielding softness, company of life; Unbending soldiers get no victories; The stiffest tree is readiest for the ax. The strong and mighty topple from their place; The soft and yielding rise above them all.
The mind wills and the body behaves.
Every conflicting center, every extraneous, disrupting, decentralizing emotion, jars the natural rhythm and reduces a man’s efficiency on the gridiron far more seriously than physical jars and bodily conflicts can ever jar him. The emotions that destroy the inner rhythm of a man are hatred, jealousy, lust, envy, pride, vanity, covetousness and fear.
as a mirror—it grasps nothing and it refuses nothing; it receives but does not keep.
“a state of wholeness in which the mind functions freely and easily, without the sensation of a second mind or ego standing over it with a club.”
No-mindedness is then not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked. It is a mind immune to emotional influences. “Like this river, everything is flowing
The baby looks at things all day without winking, that is because his eyes are not focused on any particular object. He goes without knowing where he is going, and stops without knowing what he is doing. He merges himself with the surroundings and moves along with it. These are the principles of mental hygiene.
A yielding will has a resposeful ease, soft as downy feathers, A quietude, a shrinking from action, an appearance of inability to do. Placidly free from anxiety, one acts with the opportune time; one moves and revolves in the line of creation. One does not move ahead but responds to the fitting influences. Establish nothing in regard to oneself. Let things be what they are, move like water, rest like a mirror, respond like an echo, pass quickly like the nonexistent, and be quiet as purity. Those who gain, lose. Do not precede others, always follow them.
Nothing is weaker than water, But when it attacks something hard Or resistant, then nothing withstands it, And nothing will alter its way.
The world is full of people who are determined to be somebody or to give trouble. They want to get ahead, to stand out. Such ambition has no use for a gung fu man, who rejects all forms of self-assertiveness and competition:
One who tries to stand on tiptoe cannot stand still. One who stretches his legs too far cannot walk. One who advertises himself too much is ignored. One who is too insistent on his own view finds few to agree with him. One who claims too much credit does not get even what he deserves. One who is too proud is soon humiliated. These are condemned as extremes of greediness and self-destructive activity. Therefore, one who acts naturally avoids such extremes.14 Those who know do not speak; Those who speak do not know. Stop your sense Let sharp things be blunted, Tangles resolved, The light
...more
Pride emphasizes the importance of the superiority of a person’s status in the eyes of others. There is fear and insecurity in pride because when a person aims at being highly esteemed and achieves such status, he is automatically involved in the fear of losing his status.
One is proud when he identifies himself with an imaginary self; the core of pride is self-rejection.”
A gung fu man devotes himself to being self-sufficient and never depends upon the external rating by others for his happiness. A gung fu master, unlike the beginner, holds himself in reserve, is quiet and unassuming, without the least desire to show off. Under the influence of gung fu training his proficiency becomes spiritual, and he himself, grown ever freer through spiritual struggle, is transformed. To him, fame and status mean nothing.
There are big differences between the Chinese hygiene and the Western hygiene. Some of the obvious ones are Chinese exercise is rhythmic, whereas the Western is dynamic and full of tension; the Chinese exercise seeks to merge harmoniously with nature, whereas the Western dominates it; the Chinese exercise is both a way of life and a mental cultivation, while the Western exercise is merely a sport or a physical calisthenic.
Perhaps the main difference is the fact that Chinese hygiene is Yin (softness), while Western is Yang (positiveness).
Merge the two
Western hygiene is a gratuitous waste of energy. The overexertion and overdevelopment of bodily organs involved in Western athletics is detrimental to one’s health. Chinese hygiene, on the other hand, throws its emphasis on conservation of energy; the principle is always that of moderation without going to the extreme.
Therefore in order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature.
Remember that man created method, and method did not create man, and do not strain yourself in twisting into someone’s preconceived pattern, which unquestionably would be appropriate for him, but not necessarily for you. You yourself are “expressing” the technique and not “doing” the technique; in fact, there is no doer but the action itself.
when being attacked by a thug the fact is that he has but a one-track mind, which is bent on your destruction, rarely considering what you can do. If your acts show him that he is up against something he did not expect, it will cut down his attacking ego over 50 percent and will neutralize his attack, in which case you always have the psychological advantage on your side.)
Although I am again repeating myself, I must emphasize that the success of an [assailant’s] attack depends on surprise, and if you’re sufficiently alert to prevent a surprise, your counterattack is already halfway to being successful.
There is only one basic principle of self-defense: You must apply the most effective weapon as soon as possible to the most vulnerable point of your enemy.
“He who knows does not speak. He who speaks, does not know,” wrote five-thousand words to explain his doctrine.
I thought that victory meant beating down others, but I failed to realize that victory gained by way of force was not real victory.
thought is the only thing in the universe whose existence cannot be denied,
An object must have a subject, and subject-object is a pair of complementaries
Life lives; and in the living flow, no questions are raised. The reason is that life is a living now! Completeness, the now, is an absence of the conscious mind striving to divide that which is indivisible.
Gung fu, the oldest form of self-defense, can well be termed the concentrated essence of wisdom and profound thought on the art of self-defense.
Gung fu can be said to be the Chinese attempt to discover the mysteries of nature.
A gung fu man employs his mind as a mirror—it grasps nothing, yet it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.
Socrates initiates the discussion by describing rhetoric as the “art of persuasion.” But, Socrates argues, if the rhetorician has no knowledge of what he proclaims, it is a case of the ignorant attempting to teach the ignorant; furthermore, if he discourses on justice, he must have knowledge of justice, and if he has knowledge of justice, he is just. Consequently, he could not tolerate the unjust, which would be talking without having knowledge of what one was talking about.
when a Western man reasons, he makes distinctions that would be impossible for the Chinese man to make—in fact, the Chinese would not even consider “distinction” as a part of their thought process. The Chinese looks at things as essentially ONE, or as two coexistent parts of one indivisible whole.
Therefore, instead of mutually exclusive, they are mutually dependent and are a function each of the other.
For example, the character for “good” is and that of “bad” . When combined together the word quality is formed. In order to form the whole word quality, half of the positive of is necessary. is the character for “long,” and , the character for “short,” and together it (long/short) means the length of something. The character for “buying” and that for “selling,” combine together to form the new word trade.
They are not viewed as cause and effect but are paired like sound and echo or light and shadow.
An organism works as a whole. We are not a summation of part, but a very subtle coordination of all these different bits that go into the making of the organism—we HAVE not a liver or a heart. We ARE liver and heart and brain and so on.
ANXIETY—the gap between the NOW and the THEN.
The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.
So if you are cursed with perfectionism, then you’re absolutely sunk. This ideal is a yardstick which always gives you the opportunity to browbeat yourself, to berate yourself and others.
Once we recognize the structure of our behavior, which in the case of self-improvement is the split between the top dog and the underdog, and understand how, by listening, we can bring about a reconciliation of these two fighting clowns, then we realize that we cannot deliberately bring about changes in ourselves or in others.
MANY PEOPLE DEDICATE THEIR LIVES TO ACTUALIZING A CONCEPT OF WHAT THEY SHOULD BE LIKE, RATHER THAN ACTUALIZING THEMSELVES. This difference between SELF-ACTUALIZING and SELF-IMAGE ACTUALIZING is very important. Most people only live for their image.
Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are so busy PROJECTING ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
There is only one thing that should control the situation. If you understand the situation that you are in, and let the situation that you are in control your actions, then you learn how to cope with life.
Gestalt therapy = phenomenological approach (awareness of what is) + behavioral approach (behavior in the now).
To take our place in history, to be mature, means giving up the concept that we have parents, that we have to be submissive or defiant, or the other variations on the child’s role that we play.
the fitting game. Does this concept fit in with these other concepts?
In Gestalt therapy we look at the way a person manipulates his language, and we see that the more alienated he is from himself, the more he will use nouns instead of verbs, and most especially the word “it.”
