- – – – Kimbal Anderson Sensei
So, in our practice – and I think it’s the part that a particular group of people… one of the reasons they take this up… maybe they admire a particular part of the culture… – but the idea of the ten perfections – which you’ll never hear in a dojo, nowadays, it’s not something that happens, but we still do the old thing. And it kind of comes down to this: there’s a bunch of awarenesses that you develop in training: being able to keep your focus, how to relax under challenge, how to be truly decent – where you actually look at your own heart and you can say, “doing pretty good… it’s working… I’m figuring this out…” One of the things – and this probably comes from old yoga masters – concerning certain emotions and then their negative side, is that we’re learning through conscious engagement with what’s happening with us to work on these things, so they’re no longer sabotage… so they quit sabotaging us…
Because that’s so common, isn’t it?
You guys ever sabotage yourself?
The deal comes down to this: my teacher, in this case Shoji Sensei… we were… I was trying to figure out… on one level I wanted to train the way he was asking me to train – which is respect – because he was giving me something really cool, and on the other level, the level of the ten perfections, because he’d already done it and had a good idea about human nature – he had his own life – there’s a couple of things that he simply said “Start here. If you get this part even engaged and you start working on it, you will have immediate relief.” “Relief? Relief of what? Is there a threat I don’t know about?” And he said “you’ll have immediate relief…”
And so I’m going to address that a little bit with you as we play.
You know, I tell you like: when you can be really sincere and you thank the person that whacked you, because you realize, they just showed you that you weren’t out of the way. That’s what they really did. They didn’t think, “I’m going to make this person’s life miserable, and they’ll go to bed feeling bullied like they did in eighth grade…” It’s not that. It’s just: “oh… under these conditions I get whacked when I don’t get out of the whack-zone.”
That’s a good thing.
It’s a good thing.
To be able to deal with yourself, that part of you, so then whatever you want to call that part of yourself… …one of the big nemeses of a student progressing is arrogance, to be honest with you. And it takes so many forms, and some of it is so subtle, and so justifiable, and I’ll give you an example: how many of you can find a friend who will back up, justify, and totally agree with your arrogance: “they shouldn’t talk to you that way…” and all that stuff?
You can find them pretty easy.
How many friends do you have who can say, “Peter, you’re being kind of like an ass. This isn’t a good way to operate. These people have feelings and in many cases they’re quite intelligent. And you’re pretending that this thing you have going on is more important”?
So I’m going to ask you to do this exercise with yourself.
This is ongoing. This is a verb. You have to work on this all the time… And it’s more like: you start recognizing how subtle arrogance is. And then you’ll see how you try to deal with your arrogance by being arrogant back at it. That’s the first step. You’ll do that for sure.
Now… Nothing I’m telling you is me ridiculing you. It’s just some-one who’s been there pointing out trail-markers… You know that part that says “don’t go left”. Really, don’t do it, man. It’s not about if you can survive it, you’ll just die. There is no good ‘left’ on this thing.
In the case of this arrogance thing, to discover the difference between having a good, healthy sense of boundaries, self-esteem, and all that good stuff… you cannot have that little aspect of us, the arrogant part, come up with the rules.
And that’s the trick.
Maybe, as we learn in here, you’ll discover how you made up rules, and stories, and things to reinforce those stories, and how you listened with special ears when you got feedback, and you ignored everything that didn’t fit what you wanted… But what-ever you want to talk about, with it, that’s one of the first places to begin. Because it’s in your way. The sensory part I’m trying to show you, with ki, the kind of magic… that is totally in the way of it. That totally blocks your ability to have a very real set of feedback on energy stuff.
When you relieve yourself from this one part, the subtlety will be more available to you.
But also, sometimes the arrogance is false humility. It’s false. It appears to be like the person’s getting it, but it’s actually false.
And as I’ve told you: in here, function is what we look at.