Martial Arts: Who do we fight?

The inner fight:

Our subconscious, also called our inner child, can either be a powerful ally, a source of intuition and innate wisdom, or a source of illusions, only allowing us to see the world through the filter of our memory and past experiences.

All our memories and traumas are recorded in our conscious and subconscious and if they gradually fade away from the first one, they leave indelible traces in the second. Thus, even if resolved intellectually (superficially), a problem will surface periodically (pain, illness, situations, etc) for as long as it is not treated in depth. The younger the person was when a particular trauma took place the more it is anchored into his/her subconscious. Being the most fearful part of us, linked to the survival and to the instinct of self preservation, our subconscious prefers to not evolve rather to make us take the smallest risk.

This is why Buddhism describes the world as illusory. It doesn’t mean that the world does not exist, but that our perception of the world is an illusion. We do not see things as they really are, but in relationship to the memories they evoke and awaken in us.

In one word, our vision of the future is guided by our past experiences and disconnects us from the present moment.

In the martial arts, when facing an opponent, we have to cope not only with the present danger, but also and especially, with what this situation evokes in our subconscious. Our subconscious becomes then a more dangerous enemy than the opponent himself, and our vision of the reality is erased for the illusion of our past emotional traumas.

It is for those reasons that all ancient and modern texts on the Martial Arts’ philosophy talk about the fight against ourselves and the notion of Mushin (no-thought); in order to defeat our fears and free ourselves from the emprise of the subconscious on the intellect. When our intellect is shut down and our mental is at peace, the connections between our past and our present vision loose power and only then, the Human Being can obtain what he illusory thought he had before: Free Will.