The Unmovable Mind

This post marks a milestone of sorts. This is my 1000th post at Cook Ding's Kitchen.

A friend sent me an article from which I've posted an extract below. The full article may be read here.


The calligraphy reads "Fudoushin" which means "Immovable Mind."

When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays

By JOHN TIERNEY

A quick experiment. Before proceeding to the next paragraph, let your mind wander wherever it wants to go. Close your eyes for a few seconds, starting ... now.

And now, welcome back for the hypothesis of our experiment: Wherever your mind went — the South Seas, your job, your lunch, your unpaid bills — that daydreaming is not likely to make you as happy as focusing intensely on the rest of this column will.

I’m not sure I believe this prediction, but I can assure you it is based on an enormous amount of daydreaming cataloged in the current issue of Science. Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness, psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.

The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses from more than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world were the ones in the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they were enjoying it until the iPhone interrupted.

The researchers are not sure how many of them stopped to pick up the phone and how many waited until afterward to respond. Nor, unfortunately, is there any way to gauge what thoughts — happy, unhappy, murderous — went through their partners’ minds when they tried to resume.

When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working.

When asked their thoughts, the people in flagrante were models of concentration: only 10 percent of the time did their thoughts stray from their endeavors. But when people were doing anything else, their minds wandered at least 30 percent of the time, and as much as 65 percent of the time (recorded during moments of personal grooming, clearly a less than scintillating enterprise).

On average throughout all the quarter-million responses, minds were wandering 47 percent of the time. That figure surprised the researchers, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert.

“I find it kind of weird now to look down a crowded street and realize that half the people aren’t really there,” Dr. Gilbert says.

You might suppose that if people’s minds wander while they’re having fun, then those stray thoughts are liable to be about something pleasant — and that was indeed the case with those happy campers having sex. But for the other 99.5 percent of the people, there was no correlation between the joy of the activity and the pleasantness of their thoughts.

“Even if you’re doing something that’s really enjoyable,” Mr. Killingsworth says, “that doesn’t seem to protect against negative thoughts. The rate of mind-wandering is lower for more enjoyable activities, but when people wander they are just as likely to wander toward negative thoughts.”

Whatever people were doing, whether it was having sex or reading or shopping, they tended to be happier if they focused on the activity instead of thinking about something else. In fact, whether and where their minds wandered was a better predictor of happiness than what they were doing.

Dao De Jing #39: Support

One of the world's classics of literature is also one of the foundations of philosophical Daoism, the Dao De Jing.


A free online version of the Dao De Jing may be found here. Below is verse #39, Support

39. Support

In mythical times all things were whole:
All the sky was clear,
All the earth was stable,
All the mountains were firm,
All the riverbeds were full,
All of nature was fertile,
And all the rulers were supported.

But, losing clarity, the sky tore;
Losing stability, the earth split;
Losing strength, the mountains sank;
Losing water, the riverbeds cracked;
Losing fertility, nature disappeared;
And losing support, the rulers fell.

Rulers depend upon their subjects,
The noble depend upon the humble;
So rulers call themselves orphaned, hungry and alone,
To win the people's support.

Old Karate Stories from Okinawa

From an article that appeared in Classical Fighting Arts, and was reprinted at seinenkai.com, the son of the famous Okinawan Karateka Choki Motobu speaks of his legendary father and karate stories from old Okinawa. An excerpt appears below. The full article may be read here.




A Meeting With Chosei Motobu by Graham Noble
The renewed interest in Choki Motobu has been a feature of the recent study of karate history. Anyone interested in the development of karate was well aware of Choki Motobu's name, but little if anything was known about his life and technique. He seemed to have left few living students, his dojo had long since closed down, and although he had written two books, few people were aware of them, and anyway, they had been out of print for decades. There was even a view -- and I heard this personally from a couple of senior Japanese teachers -- that Motobu was not a true karate master but rather just a fighter who made use of karate techniques.

But, as research into karate history developed, people began to look afresh at Choki Motobu and his legacy. Bit by bit material became available, and gradually it became possible to get some idea of his life and methods. Then just a couple of years ago Kimo Ferreira, a kempo instructor from Hawaii, made contact with Choki Motobu's son Chosei and helped introduce him to American karateka. In July 2002 when Kimo and his wife Kiko accompanied Chosei Sensei and his senior student Takeji Inaba to England for a seminar, they stopped off in London for some sightseeing, and this is where Harry Cook and I were able to meet the group and try and find out a little more about Motobu karate. Chosei Sensei does not speak English, but Keiko did a great job translating.

At the time of the meeting Chosei Motobu was seventy-eight and Takeji Inaba seventy-four, and they were remarkably sprightly for their age. Not long before, they had completed their Tsunami video, on which they personally demonstrate all the techniques. Chosei had spent his working life as a policeman in Osaka, and when he retired he decided to devote his time to the development of Motobu style karate.

He had studied karate with his father, he told us, from the age of fourteen, when Choki Sensei would come down from Tokyo to visit his family in Osaka. The training ceased when Chosei was seventeen and Choki Motobu returned to Okinawa. Chosei did not learn karate from anyone else, though for a time he did train along with a student of the well known Shinpan Gusukuma (Shiroma). He recalled that this karateka (I thought I caught the name Kina, but can't be sure) would walk around the dojo on his toes as training for the front kick.

What did Choki Motobu teach his son? For kata, essentially Naihanchi, which constituted a kind of kihon, or basic training -- Motobu did not teach the modern method of moving up and down the dojo drilling single techniques -- and kumite, mainly the twelve kumite sequences shown in his 1926 book and in Chosei's recent Tsunami video. Choki Motobu also stressed two points: 1. Always irimi (enter): move into your opponent's territory, don't step backwards; 2. Don't stand in neko ashi (cat) stance. This is a defensive position, and Motobu used to say that if you take up this stance, in a way you are telling the opponent you are losing. He may also have found that the neko ashi stance hadn't worked out too well in the numerous close quarters fights he had had back in Okinawa.

Choki Motobu used kicks, but sparingly. He taught that kicking should not be used as a first attack. There are risks in kicking, and Motobu considered that you should only kick when you have a strength advantage over your opponent, (60 to 40, according to Chosei), or when you have first hit him with a punch or a strike. Timing is essential: you have to choose the right moment when you will knock the opponent down with one kick. Also, don't kick higher than the waist.

We mentioned that Choki Motobu's karate was close range, in contrast to Funakoshi's Shotokan, for example, where opponents take up kumite positions a relatively long distance apart. At this, Chosei Motobu stood up to demonstrate with Inaba Sensei. The engagement was from a close distance, forearms in contact ("a basic training form"), and Chosei explained that at this distance it was easier to control the opponent and anticipate his actions. When a punch was thrown Chosei blocked it close in. The non-blocking hand was not pulled back to the hip in the orthodox hikite position, but kept close in front of the body, where it was ready to block a second punch, as Chosei demonstrated. In Motobu karate both hands are often used together, and this is called meotode, or "husband-and-wife hand"; the hands are close and work together to achieve the desired result. We mentioned that Choki Motobu would often use the front hand to strike, and Chosei said yes, a student (maybe it was Hironori Ohtsuka) had once asked Choki which hand should be used to strike, and he had replied, "The hand closest to the opponent."

Who Needs Fiction: Wanna See Tough?

I am not eloquent enough to comment.

Wanna See Tough? - watch more funny videos

On Zanshin

I made a post a long time ago on Zanshin, or "remaining mind." You can follow this link to read the post.

What follows are some examples of Zanshin.

Not So Fast

Some thoughts on doing the taijiquan form correctly, not slowly.

Everyone is familiar with seeing the taijiquan form being practiced slowly. I don’t see that slowness is actually the characteristic that is being refined, but of not being in a hurry. Without paying attention to what we’re really doing, even if you start the form slowly, you’ll find yourself going faster and faster as you get towards the end. The taijiquan form can be practiced fast as well, but mindless rushing is doing you any good either.

Since it’s harder to train oneself to not be in a hurry, that is the characteristic it makes sense to work on that first. Simply pay attention to what you are doing with each movement, give it your full attention and if you add anything on top of it next, keep your mind on maintaining an even pace.

When you pay attention to what you’re doing, you’re naturally slowing down as a result. When you are not in a hurry and pay attention to what you’re doing, you’ll find more and more details to which you should pay attention, which slows you down further. Even in instances where you don’t seem to be doing anything, you’ll likely find that your alignment, weighting and posture could use some attention.

Having the attitude of not being in a hurry is just opposite of having the feeling that you’ve got to get it done; to get to the end. It’s that feeling that you have to get to the conclusion that prods you to rush faster and faster through the form. Placing on artificial deadline on when you’ll finish the form will foster this. Speed has its’ place once the form is correct and you’ve mastered slowness through not being in a hurry.

Once you can keep your mind on what you are doing throughout the form as well as all of the details, you can start to do the form more quickly as long as you can maintain the concentration and the level of detail. Lacking either of those, it’s a sign that maybe you shouldn’t go so quickly; not yet anyway.

The older I get I find the less I find myself in any hurry. Everything unfolds in its’ own time. The Daoist recognizes the rhythm of the moment and paces himself accordingly. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but always the appropriate speed.


Finally, you may wonder about the accompanying picture of Audrey Hepburn. What does she have to do with all of this? Nothing. She's just hot.

Who Needs Fiction: Sliced Fruit, a Summertime Treat

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy Fourth of July! I've posted this video before, but I really like the song. Enjoy.

The Mysterious Technique of the Old Cat

Quite some time ago, I had a post linking to an old Japanese story, the Mysterious Technique of the Old Cat. Over at Ichijoji there is a more recent post on the same topic. An excerpt is below. The whole article may be read here.

Overview
It is a fable, and this is part of its attraction and why it is so accessible. A samurai named Shoken (his name means 'Victorious Sword' or something along those lines) finds a large rat running about his house. His own cat runs away in fright and he has no luck when he tries to kill it himself. the three experienced rat-catching cats in the area have no luck either, so it is left to an old cat in a neighboring part of town to take care of things. That night, the cats have a little celebration, and ask the old cat to explain why he was so successful. He offers critiques of their methods and goes on to explain his own approach. Shoken has been listening in and interjects his own question, which the old cat answers, expanding on his original answer.

What makes it a key text?
The critiques of the old cat are important in that they compare the different methods of the three cats, each one of which uses an approach focused on one aspect of combat. Actually, each one of these approaches is fairly specific, and anyone with a broad background in martial arts that includes some knowledge about different styles and approaches, and the arguments that surround them will probably find this quite familiar. They are particularly apposite in terms of swordsmanship - from this and other writings, it seems there was some dispute about which was the most effective approach to swordsmanship, both in terms of training and tactical usage during the period in which he was writing... and later, too.