A Roomba is supposedly a “smart” appliance. But is it smarter than you? Are you telling me the Roomba can sweep the floor better than you can? Or are you just so lazy that you want to rely on these conveniences? I don’t have a Roomba, and I don’t want one. Even if you give me one as a gift for free, I don’t want it. It’s a giant oversized frisbee that I can’t even play with. A Roomba is intended for lazy people, and in the most sublime of ways, undermines the individual’s ability to be free and discipline themselves at the most menial of levels. Don’t get me wrong; I’m all for convenience, but when convenience starts to destroy the ethical foundations of working hard and disciplining oneself, then we must take a step back and question the validity of such a convenience. Instead of having things like that think for you, you need to think for yourself. This is what I feel we are losing, or have already lost, in mainstream culture and mainstream martial arts. When an individual starts relying on things that are necessary to motivate them for their training, you never truly find a way to tap into your own motivation, your own power and energy to create and truly have a visceral connection with what you’re doing. Conveniences are nice, but real things, things that matter, things that will make a lasting impression and effect on the individual are inconvenient and must be worked continually, incessantly, fervently. Even if you’re so-called “good” at something, you can’t go on automatic pilot. That’s why I’m saying don’t be a Roomba.
A Roomba is an automatic pilot. You turn it on, you run the program and you just sit there and let it do its thing. Meanwhile, you completely disengage. In martial art terms, the form that you train, the techniques, the movements that you do, those are tools, just as those technological things, your personal computer, your so-called smart phone, your Roomba, your dishwasher, your Mr. Coffee, your electric toothbrush, they’re tools. Those tools should not be the master; you should be the master of the tools. But in order for you to master those tools and really be able to utilize them to the fullest, you must not be caught up with them. I remember talking with my teacher about how everyone’s not able to interface with what I’m teaching them or having a difficult time because they’re caught up with learning that particular piece. They’re trying so hard, to their credit, but almost trying too hard. In trying too hard, they negate the process of learning because you push yourself into a corner. That’s where I came up with the analogy of the Roomba, because inevitably the thing bangs into the wall, gets stuck under the couch, rolls up under the dog and bangs against the wall until you get up and reset its direction. Or maybe you don’t even have to get up; maybe you remotely reset its direction.
I hate that remote thing because life cannot be done remotely. Kung Fu cannot be done remotely. It’s that visceral thing we’re talking about. You have to have that. It’s great that you watch sporting events on TV and get all excited about watching the quarterback fumble the ball or make the touchdown, but you’re not on the field. You’re salivating as you watch the master chef cook on the cooking show, but you’re not really eating. You’re getting all jazzed up about these things that aren’t real but not understanding it’s not real and therefor missing the point. They originally called TV a boob tube because watching it made you a “boob.” Drugs are called “dope” because they make you into a dope. Everything that dulls the senses should be to us anathema. This is why I find Kung Fu so refreshing. When it’s played right, it heightens all your senses – sight, sound, taste, smell, feeling. In order to learn Kung Fu and really get the real feeling of it, it has to be live. It’s about the live response of an opponent having an altercation with you. It’s about the live response of you moving your mind and body and feeling all the humors within your body move. Not to get into scientific and medical jargon, but your blood, your chi, the oxygen levels in your body, all that has to be done physically within and without the individual. So, it’s dangerous to rely on anything that you personally don’t have control over. It’s dangerous to rely on autopilot, because if you rely on things that you don’t have control over, then once they’re either taken away or no longer accessible, you find yourself lost. Not only that, but you’ve given those things control over you. So, basically you’ve become an addict and you lose your freedom to be real. That’s contrary to what the exercise of Kung Fu is all about. Kung Fu is all about getting in touch with the real individual, as I spin my Fong Ting Gik around the room, thinking about this blog.
When you train, you can’t be that programmed Roomba that we’re using as an example and just go through the motions, hard, stiff and strong without feeling. Feeling is important. What is feeling? There’s the physical feeling of touch. You need to have that. If you don’t have that physical feeling of touch, you’ve already cut off one of your senses. You have to use all your senses to learn Kung Fu. When you come into the Mo Gwoon, you smell the incense, you smell the sweat, you smell the energy in the room. You taste it in the air. That’s why the training’s not the same when you’re not in the school. You can’t reproduce that energy. It’s what they say about the journey as opposed to the destination. Everybody’s caught up with the destination, but you haven’t even started the journey because you’re sitting on your couch watching something online remotely as your Roomba is picking up the popcorn and Cheetle dust instead of you getting off your ass and doing it yourself. There’s a difference between getting up and cracking two eggs, frying up the bacon and making your own sandwich as opposed to going to Dunkin Donuts. Oh, not even going, because you’re not allowed to go… having it delivered by a free delivery service, but you know it’s a powdered egg at best with mystery meat posing as bacon. Who knows how old it is? Who knows where it came from? I don’t even know if a chicken laid that one. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s a personal decision, how the student approaches his training. You can either approach your training by wanting to be 100% involved or you’re just going to access it remotely – even if you’re in class.
This has a lot to do with the ability and the attitude of the individual. You have to able to maintain and focus the proper attitude in order to keep the learning going. We can’t rely on a program, per se. You can learn the program, the movement, the technique, yet somehow you can’t make it come alive. Everybody has Photoshop; it’s almost standard for computers to have, but how come different designers have different levels of design? This goes back to the two fried eggs and bacon. You can get takeout, or have it delivered or make it at home. One way is convenient, easy, standardized, and always going to be the same time, but somehow it lacks that organic nature. Sometimes the student becomes so focused on the program, or form, that you’re missing the real point of what’s going on. It starts to become more performance than actual practice. This is what I was trying to convey to my (online) class last night, that the movement is an idea, not a form. It’s the ultimate expression of that idea, not necessarily a particular pattern. This is what most people get so concentrated on. It makes me think of the phrase, “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” Most students, after a while, get stuck because they can’t see beyond the confines of the shape of that thing. But the shape that they see is something that they have preproscribed to the item.
This comes back to the student trying too hard. You’ve learned the set of movements. You’re trying very, very hard to make it happen, but sometimes when you try too hard to make things happen, it has a tendency to, at the very least, become stiff, dry and not a true representation of what you’re trying to learn or show. This has a negative effect of pushing the individual in the wrong direction. You get trapped in a box, and you don’t see a lid, you don’t see a doorknob or a keyhole. You don’t see the way out because you don’t know what to look for in order to be able to get yourself out of that rut. That’s another pitfall that a lot of students have is they fall into ruts. You get used to one thing. That’s what’s happening right now; we’re getting used to be being bombarded with negative media and thoughts. It’s pervasive. This is what’s dangerous about getting used to something. You get accustomed to throwing a punch a certain way. You get accustomed to throwing a kick a certain way. That’s fine in the beginning. You need something to latch onto, but the student must be warned that this is not the only way to deal with and/or execute a particular technique. As you become more advanced as a practitioner, you can have a stylistic interpretation, but you must be open to being able to see things different ways. When you get used to a first impression, your mind is not open. First impressions are dangerous for the most part because they’re based on only what you can perceive at that moment in time with lack of experience. What happens to most students and/or individuals is they get caught up with their first impression and can’t seem to be able to add on or formulate a secondary or tertiary impression. This stagnates them and leaves them stuck. Because they’re stuck, they can’t go beyond themselves and then there’s no more growth, and you end up doing the same old same old. In order to excel at any one particular skill set, one has to be able to revisit and revise their understanding and grow through that process. Getting more has a lot to do with giving up, giving up your preconceived notions and/or first impressions of what something is or is like. Your first impression is based solely on a knee jerk reaction because of your lack of experience and lack of information on that said system, situation, technique, individual person or whole situation.
In order for you to learn anything, especially the art of Kung Fu, you need experience, and this can only be gotten by having live real time experience, and always keeping the mind fresh. Even though as an individual you may be very astute, very smart, even brilliant, that doesn’t mean there isn’t more to be learned or gleaned. This requires consistent trial, error, correction, and then doing that again without ever saying, “I quit.” You are doing the same thing, but not necessarily the same way. You’re striving to make it better every single time without destroying the integrity of that which you are doing. It’s the process of work itself that makes it better, keeping the integrity of it in tact while remaining open minded. When you do what I’m saying, your growth potential becomes limitless in that item. You become limitless in your potential of understanding.
If you want to be more than what you are, you have to come away from you. It’s a point of departure from your norm, your normal way of thinking. You have to cultivate the capability of disassociating yourself from yourself in order to see what else can be done to make your interpretation evolve, change and grow. It’s dangerous to become fully automated like a Roomba. That’s the joy and pleasure of driving a car that’s a stick shift and not automatic. You feel the car, you feel the road, you feel everything. Stay real. Stay organic. It’s going to be different every time. Being alive is about having a live response. Feeling is everything. Feeling is being alive, even from the smallest task of sweeping the floor. You might say, “I got this Roomba. It can do this for me,” but for me, I’d rather do it for myself.
- Master Paul Koh 高寶羅
