Fight Diary

Preface: The internal life of the Mind requires quiet patience. A boxer will practice the same punch 100 times and each time may feel a slight difference, the hip moved first, the front two knuckles connected, boxers listen to their body to refine a punch that every rookie boxer learns on their first day. What distinguishes a beginner’s jab from a pro fighter’s jab is not solely how many times they practiced it, but also the intention they practiced their jabs with. A good jab is the product of experimentation, of tweaking and trying out the different ways our body can produce a jab, and adopting the jab that is most suited to their body and style of fighting. A good jab also allows the willed force of the fighter to flow uninterruptedly through the fibers of their muscles. The Mind too benefits from being heard with intentful awareness, experimentation with the tools everyone learns in pre-school, and surrendering to the uninterrupted flow of energy through the network of one’s Mind.

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* Any quotes and thoughts of Bruce's are from his daughter Shannon Lee's book 'Be Water, My Friend'. Highly recommended to any student of life. I included page numbers on occasions, got lazy on others. In any case, hers is one of those books you need to read from cover to cover to really benefit from its contents. The journey of reading it whole has more to teach us than snippets of Bruce's thoughts taken as ends in themselves. 

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Bruce Lee’s Stages of Cultivation 

1. Partiality 

2. Fluidity 

3. Emptiness 

1. Partiality or The ‘Running to Extremes’

Bruce cultivated his intellectual practice in parallel to his martial evolution. Yin & Yang could represent the internal balance between the two poles of our being, our own push & pull, reflective and pre-reflective mind, I suspect also the two sides of all our parts as well, hearts and spirit. Yin & Yang could also represent a balance between a Self and the World, Place, Time, the ecology that surrounds us. Balance could also be found between a fighter and their opponent, their partner in a larger symphony, accounting for both our offensive and defensive roles when engaged in combat. Partiality is when we’re run by unconscious and impulsive drives for motion. We cycle and jump from Yin to Yang, still contained within the innerchosm of the Self. We’re good and villainize the bad, or bad and infantize the good, we’re right or wrong; reason and understanding are yet to be engaged. Here a fighter would throw a punch with “inexperienced, uncontrolled wildness to it; there’s no technique, no skill. This stage is represented by a fragmented Yin & Yang symbol with no inner relatedness…”

Because we’re stuck seeking our Selves here, in our internal lives, in our lives with others, there’s “no awareness when it comes to thoughts, emotions, and actions.” We’re reactive to our environment and lack inner autonomy. When Yin & Yang are fragmented Yin seeks to establish and verify its existence through the anti-thesis of Yang, and similarly, Yang will seek to find its place in the conquest of Yin. We self-destructively seek the other. So good is good and bad is bad, there’s no mixing them, and our reactions to our opposites will be impulsive and knee-jerky. You disagree with me? Too bad you’re wrong! You’re not on my side? Oh then you must be against me. Shannon Lee says “we fail to see the other side, any other experience, or any other way.” We view our experience from the narrow lens of our sometimes inclusive interests, and neglect that other people have wholeass other lives, entirely different experiences, beliefs, views and feelings that don’t have to be in accord with our own to be part of the living fabric of Reality. We’re unaware of the “blocks within ourselves that are keeping us trapped in behavioral patterns”. We’re not grounded or rooted. 

2. Fluidity or ‘The two halves of one whole’

Once we acknowledge our incompleteness, all that we have yet to learn and experience, we start working on ourselves. Here we become an agent in our own life and experience a “budding conscious awareness”. In martial arts, our initial concept and idea of a punch is now grounded in the actual experience and understanding of a punch. We might notice our hips swiveling, the balls of our rear foot lifting and twisting to give way to our hip’s extension, we feel our shoulder launching, and the energy moving through the fibers of our muscles down to the tip of the knuckle and through our opponent's chest. A good punch requires an awareness of the body producing it, a naturalistic presence with the senses that experience the improv jazz your partner and you are making. We’re present with our environment, the people in it, the circumstances we’re presented with and we accept them as they are. The world is as it is, the punches flying towards us are there, they’re coming and we have no control over the set of circumstances we are insisted on to surrender to. When we come across a door we’d like to cross, and we land on the wrong key in our key chain, it would be foolish to try to change the lock rather than the key we tried opening it with. Similarly, changing the circumstances and all those who inhabit it, rather than our approach to them is just as ridiculous. Fighting or escaping our circumstances doesn’t work or feel nearly as good as working with our circumstances. 

Bruce’s symbol for this stage is the complete Yin & Yang, the light with the dark at the center, the dark with light at its center, circling one another. This stage is no longer restricted to the still and rigid concepts of good and bad, rather, good & bad are represented as dynamic and interdependent, they’re situated in a living and active interplay of the two complementary forces (173). “In this stage, we are open and engaged in learning and bettering ourselves. We see that harnessing our potential is achievable, albeit both exciting and terrifying.” Can you imagine that, for your potential, the responsibility and limitless capacity of your faculty for choice, to get you shaking at the edge of your seat before you go out there and make it actual, achieve your goal and work on your dreams? A force of nature so powerful, so unrestricted, choice gave humankind the capacity to liberate or enslave themselves, to build new worlds of care and commune, to burn others to ashes, to create or destroy, to love or hate, to live or to envy the grave. Choice is a trust given to us from a time long before this life, a responsibility to be free and to use that freedom wisely. No wonder Shannon described our potential as terrifying, what an awesome gift and curse if misused in one’s lifetime. 

In our experience of fluidity the pollutants of our being become apparent to us, we run into blocks. Mental blocks interrupting the fluidity of our minds, and emotional blocks getting in the way of the rivers of the Heart. We deal with each kind of pollutant differently, untangle mental knots with common sense, apply care to emotional wounds or hangups. We actively respond to these blocks by addressing the behavioral patterns, learning from them, and practicing our growth through the disentangled knots that interrupted our fluidity of conscious awareness. What were once moments of fluidity become a perception that “fluidity is a possibility, and balance and wholeness become real objectives because we see the results of our awareness and our effort.” Our commitment to understanding our Selves whole, includes understanding the areas we lack resolve in, and the need to address and work on them. We view these challenges as part of a larger process of improving our quality of Life our sense of attunement and our understanding of our needs, our unique selfhood, and dreams. Naturally, this humbling process requires us to acknowledge what we don't know and how our suffering shaped or held us back, before we strive to bridge the mystery of the unknown and apply care to the healing wound. Humility has a beautiful way of extending into compassion for others’ own processes of growth and learning. Accepting our own shortcomings is a cool reminder to tend to our own backyard before judging anyone else’s. We all become collective members of a human race each tending to our own individual bit of suffering, growth, joy, and all-encompassing life, we see our own struggles, and our overcoming them, we develop compassion for other people’s struggles and plights through theirs. Bruce and the rest of humanity find themselves in and out of fluidity at different stages in our lives. Bruce divided after the fight in Oakland to literally etch his commitments to consciously aware fluidity in stone. Fluidity within his internal being, and with the world circumstances around him, within his martial and creative craft too. This conscious decision led to the development of the art of Jeet-kun-do, he commissioned a grave to be engraved by his former student George Lee with the following:

“In memory of a once fluid man crammed and distorted by the classical mess.”

Commitment to moving through this life awake, aware, moving constantly forward and upward can open a world of horizons that one dare not even imagine. Bruce “started to tinker and express and reach”, he developed his understanding skill, had no masters and thus learned from all masters and applied these teachings to his life. We’ve overcome the existentialist hump of meaningless existence by launching in Kierkekardian fashion on a lifetime of intentional and daring self-actualization. Fluidity opens our awareness to the vast expanse of views, feelings, and ideas that are not our own, we’re open to observing them, coexisting with them without fearing the annihilation of our beliefs or the eclipsing of our feelings. One time a physics Ph.D. student came into the restaurant where I worked and I weighed his table. He launched off on the coolest discussion of his thesis on quantum computing using elements that change states at room temperatures in an effort to get around the super-cooling requirement. Point is he asked me if I’m keeping up, I replied that “I can observe what he says, appreciate it and engage with it, but I couldn’t reconstruct it.” Fluid curiosity, uninhibited by the presupposition of knowledge, is just observation, its clear surrender to the story told by its storyteller. Fluid listening for example, takes a clear focus, an outward disposition to be beside one’s self when listening intently to something bigger than You. Challenges no longer become problems because “there is not only one solution to every problem” anymore. To be fluid is also to have access to the entirety of one's being, at least after a while of swimming in our own skin, we can then “engage our many tools and develop more.” Shannon says we become more creative and expressive, “we learn to accept the ever-changing nature of life and to work with rather than against it.” 

Fluidity and spiritual maturity aren’t solely resolved through daring challenges, by taunting a defying stare at the forces that Be and put us here, we don’t have to be Bruce Lee to be free, alive, aware, awake and fluidly navigating our circumstances on our way to our future. Taking ownership over one’s freedom and life is a daunting, but rewarding path. The highest abbots in Tibet know that when the Buddha came out of a 49-day-long fast and meditation, his enlightened smile dropped its shoulders and asked for a meal. Life doesn’t have to be lived in pursuit of something as misleading as the word enlightenment, some final destination, ultimate state of being. The Light of Reality is all-encompassing, how long we stay in the light, or move in view of its principles is a matter of personal conviction. Life doesn't have to be lived for some heroic journey to redeem and free yourself from chains you anchor to your own legs, not when freedom is an inescapable truth of our being. What happens when we relinquish any attempt at establishing some conceptual, rigid and still construction of selfhood? We recognize the self-nihilating nature of a free self, in considering the self to be no-thing, at once we identify selfhood with everything, and we take on the responsibility of settling into the fleeting disappearance of every past version of our selves, and of creating one’s self in the dynamic unfolding of our lives within the unending passage of time. This brings us to the third stage of cultivation 

3. Emptiness or the formless form

Bruce called this third stage the Living Void, “or the formless form.” Here your reflective and pre-reflective mind have been well acquainted by your awareness, Your conscious and unconscious being are considered and engaged with as parts of a dynamic whole. In parallel to the martial arts analogy, a punch reverts back to the instinctive punch of the beginner; except with the added benefits of the stage of fluidity that gained skillful experience in understanding the reason and poetry of how a punch works. This is like Hegel’s initial shape of consciousness, sense-certainty, the unified experience with the world in the naturalistic present, eventually coming back around through a series of dialectic progressions of consciousness and Spirit. Back around to sense-certainty at a higher octave after consciousness gained the experiences of perception, identity over time, reason, the engagement of the understanding, and self-consciousness, of itself as ‘I’, and of itself as spirit all along. In the end, consciousness returns to where it began, as a wide-eyed child looking at the world in the living and present moment, through the entirety of our being and the experience we still lacked when we were snot-nosed shitheads with no social cues. It comes back around with the wisdom it gained before it was ready to experience the world in its most simple, bare and vulnerable form; a formless form ready to be molded at the wish of a willing glance, molded to meet the necessities of the moment, the opportunities, obstacles, and general life of a unified heart. No wonder Bruce tinkered all the time, with his gleeful enthusiasm and determination to solve the next problem, untangle the next Gordian knot. And then live it, truthfully…

I think it's important to note here that the experience of the living void isn't observant only to wisdom’s unification of the conscious and unconscious mind as the same whole, but also the unification of the Heart through the loving feat of reconciling both its halves. The first half is the pulsating propensity of naive hearts to rejoin the oneness of the Heart that contains them, the womb that surrounds them, it's our hearts counting down towards Death. The second half is the indomitable urge to protect the living flames we call love, to ensure this heart, and the hearts of our people keep beating, that we survive this fickle life, that we make it through at the end of the day above the thick mud and get to look up at the stars; it's our Hearts beating for Life. The urge to rejoin the Hearts that we find our love entwined with, is an urge to burn in the forge of creation, an urge to destroy or create one'self, to fly through the Sun to reach heaven, it is the call of our spirits for freedom through nihilation. The urge to secure our basic needs, to survive, us and our people, is most genuinely, a desire to protect whom we love from this material Dunya. We have to be true to both aspects of our hearts to truly surrender to the living void, the part that wants to fade in the embrace of love, and the part that wants to survive the erasure of its individuality, to simply live. 

So! The punch here returns to be a plain old punch, except the difference between this punch and a beginner’s punch is that it's jampacked with experience, and is “at once skillful and spontaneous.” The spontaneity of the punch here is important, in the heart of battle you don’t have time to think and engage in an inner monologue to come up with the solution, a warrior that surrenders to their formless form, feels with their mind, is so deeply immersed in the moment, their senses so well acquainted and familiar with the circumstances presented to them, that suggestions from environmental cues or objects immersed in this world that is at once intelligible and sensuous, present themselves, or more accurately, are synthesized by the fluid and immersed mind’s receptivity to recognized patterns of rational design. 17th-century samurai Miyamoto Musashi wrote in the Book of Five Rings the following passage that Lee takes to be representative of the living void:

“His plan came to him like a flash of light, it was not readied out by the theories of the Art of War, which constituted the fiber of the trained warrior's intuition. To reason out a mode of attack was a dilatory process, often resulting in defeat in situations where speed was of the essence. The warrior’s instinct was not to be confused with animal instinct. Like a visceral reaction, it came from a combination of wisdom and discipline. It was an ultimate reasoning that went beyond reason, the ability to make the right move in a split second without going through the process of thinking.”

Sounds familiar? That’s because most people experience a form of this in their respective crafts. Those choices we make in a state of flow aren’t reasoned out by inner dialogue, they come out of a spontaneous and well-trained intuition. This kind of effortless effort is an example of Lee’s principle that “the height of technique is to have no technique” (175). Intuition has to not only be refined by experience and knowledge, but it also has to be situated in the moment, the present that the world’s circumstances unfold in. The intuition is spontaneous, a suggestion perhaps of the unconscious part of your mind that is unified in its pursuit of a solution to the problem its reflective counterpart of the mind is facing. The warrior’s instinct is distinguished from the animalistic instinct, this intuition isn’t an impulse or reactive kneejerk to the environment we relate to mechanically, but rather the warrior’s instinct is trained, autonomous and uniquely creative. In a similar way, when we say follow your Heart, it doesn't mean go collapse into a hedonistic pursuit of your pleasures, but rather, listen to the moderation and balance of the place your heart was born, the place it rejoins the rest of creation from. There’s some beautiful wisdom that is readily shared from listening to all it has gone through. Our hearts aren’t merely appetitive, they also tether us to the living fabric of our world. Miyamoto’s intuition came from a palace of “wisdom and discipline”, “beyond reason”, I suspect consciousness was momentarily drawing on an intelligible substrate it finds itself unified with, consciousness co-authors this intuition with the ‘meaning-full’ world. 

This intuition “emerges from the void, where there is no I and there is no opponent. There is only the totality of what is and what happens in response to what is. In other words, it hits all by itself. This is the ultimate in water level mastery.” (175)

Notice how she says “in water” and not just “as water.” Bruce famously said be water my friend, this third stage suggests another part of this quote, be in water as well. In Heidegger’s Being in Time he argues that Dasein is the untranslatable German word that describes being as it figures naturally and dynamically in an ecosystem of time, space, and other beings. Being, or Dasein, the whole and dynamic being of individuals, finds itself in an ecosystem of meaning. We find ourselves enmeshed in the historical context of humanity, taking up the history that has shaped the present moment. We also find ourselves in space, in self-sufficient worlds of meaning we navigate when forming our own. This world and our participation in it, inform the ideologies, thoughts, and paradigms we engage with. The civil and natural worlds are in constant conversation with us. In the 70s at the height of the Cold War era, the US and USSR were finding any grounds to battle on. One of these stages was architectural export. The US and Soviet Union competed over the urban landscapes of foreign cities as a way of packaging their respective ideologies in the walls they planted abroad. American modernity took the architectural form of mass developments for the middle class, homes filled with common space, located in suburbia where community engagement is encouraged by the mere architecture they live their lives in. This meaning embedded in the structures of American homes espoused liberal and democratic ideologies valuing “family, anti-communism, individualism and democracy” (Faulks 2). Before the wall fell, West Berlin was filled with American architect Gropius’ designs and Western liberal preferences for meaning-making. The Dessau Torten housing estate was a suburbia, it incorporated classical liberal economic ideologies in the architectural makeup of these homes aimed at housing families in good homes with increased standards of living and the capitalist promise of upward mobility for the lower and middle classes. Contrastingly, East Berlin imported the Leninist communist strain of architectural modernity. The point is, that your environment and the senses you engage it with, informs the world you create meaning with. You can localize this ‘world’ to the immediate sphere you found yourself in, but our realities are always contextualized within a history of self and communal realization, and we bring this context everywhere as we aim to the future. 

So when consciousness sets itself outwards, at this stage of maturity as a formless form in a living void, as the emergent state of consciousness into the world that emerges neither from your internal life, nor the external form we occupy in relation to others, but rather from no-thingness, from the gap in between our internal and external worlds. Lee states that at this stage “you are unlimited. You stand at the center point of possibility to move in any direction. This is no longer a tactical readiness but rather total awareness with instantaneous expression” (176). It seems we’re firstly grounded, present, aware, empty of mind and heart, but nevertheless aware; reduced to our most simple, and basic component: “I am.” Our mere existence, without any accolades, any possession, attachment, we’re still water. We begin aware, inwardly, then we turn outwards to the time and place we find ourselves in. It takes a certain courage to be present with the entirety of the encompassing moment, to be “totally aware”. The moment we experience is just as known to us as it is unknown, it can be grand and overwhelming, you could be facing down an Armada of Extraterrestrials or a furious Arab Mom, and yet to remain still within this context, accepting your circumstances as they are and our being nevertheless, is a lot harder than it sounds. That's not even the impressive part of emptiness, the reduction of our ecosystem to its bare, essential and simple components, the cool part is the following “instantaneous expression.” It’s one thing to find stillness within, to feel the currents of our own mind, heart and spirit, for fighters this is like allowing the singular fluid expression of force that flows through your body when shadowboxing, to find its natural sequence of motion. It's another thing entirely to find balance and fluidity with a partner, to move fluidly with an opponent, or even the moment and circumstances we find ourselves in. To surrender to the moment that is bigger than you, to come out of your Self and meet your partner in the middle, in the moment that houses you both. A lot of interesting things can happen in this space between spaces when your partner and you become co-authors of the same song.