The Five Developments are a sequence of ideas that describe how you create your experiences or awareness boundary. (Your awareness boundary is the limitation of your consciousness, e.g. how far you can see, the level of your education, or your emotional maturity.) The ideas consist of two different concepts: Illusion Being and consciousness. Illusion Being
Worry is a strong feeling of concern that you might experience about a temporary situation in the present or future. Because you are focused on your worry, you blind yourself to many of the variables involved in that situation. Eventually, your worry will cause depression, obsession, and anxiety. Although worry is a psychological phenomenon, it
Emotions are feelings: negative emotions like sadness and fear cause suffering; positive emotions like happiness and gratitude cause joy. They appear when you are aware of yourself in relation to your surroundings. They change according to changes in that relationship and your intention. Everyone has their own way of using emotions as a tool for
Desire is the power of wanting. The power itself is neither good nor bad. It can be the cause of unlimited joy, but also the cause of a black hole of suffering. Blindly following your desire will cause your life to swing between joy and depression, pleasure and pain, without any control. Desire is a
Discipline 1: Pose and Feeling Control Start with the pose, as if being eternal, ending with silence, as if there is no time. Beginning with any pose, you must concentrate fully, without fear, and feel as if the whole universe is focused on you as its centre. Trust yourself as if you control the entire
Let’s first compare martial art training to driving a racing car, before explaining the top secrets of self-defence. A well-trained martial art body (strong bone density, well-developed muscles, and flexibility) is the high-tech design of a racing car’s shape. The force of martial art (energy and speed) is the engine. The fighting technique (ability to
Comparing Western Physical Training and Eastern Martial Arts 1. Westerners concentrate on building up their bodies and are more concerned with their appearance than their performance. If people were racing cars, Westerners would only be interested in the shell. Eastern martial arts are not about caring how big that shell is, but how aerodynamic and
The original idea of kung fu has nothing to do with the martial arts. “Kung” means the time devoted to working on something. “Fu” means a tough guy or an intelligent person. When put together, the phrase describes somebody who works hard at a task. Chinese people even use this to make jokes about their
Many people believe that consciousness (thinking power is called brain consciousness) is uniquely human. The French philosopher René Descartes proposed the philosophy of “I think, therefore I am”, but if that is the case then you don’t exist because when you were a baby, you couldn’t think. So that idea is wrong. Animals also don’t
When I was young, just a teenager, I read many things from philosophy; many of these books I read were just ideas and beautiful words for me. They didn’t go into my head or heart. They sounded just too far away from normal life; it was like reading a fantasy book: they have nothing to
This is currently the main Chinese philosophy and religion. It has existed for about 5,000 years. Originally, the principle of Taoism was a pure philosophy of helping people to understand the unlimited strength of life, but ordinary Chinese people were not able to understand it in the right way, so they made a religion of
This is a philosophy as well as a martial art technique. (The correct spelling is “Taiji” but “Tai Chi” is more common.) The philosophy of Tai Chi comes from Taoism. According to Taoism, the essence of life has no limitation. In Chinese it’s called wuji. According to the philosophy, wuji acts in two opposite directions:
Happy Heart You build up stress and get psycho because of a bad habit: you don’t balance your stress every day. It’s like a little snowball rolling down a hill. In the beginning, it’s small and you can stop it. As it rolls, it becomes bigger, big enough to smash your house. If you
Everything that has happened, is happening, or is going to happen belongs to the Time Circle. The first part is like a memory of what has happened. For example, if you see a movie for the second time, the memory of your first viewing will be recalled, which is the past. When the Past Time
