Mushin

“Only the one who is completely aware of his surrounding can enjoy a cup of tea” I’ve been meaning to quote a short story I wrote for this essay but due to the 650 words limitation, I only quoted the sentence I believed summarized best the theme.

Mushin is a state of no thought. But it doesn’t mean empty mind nor stupidity. The mind exists in a state of nothingness. The person concentrates all his mind on the present.

This idea is the sun of the small galaxy that is me. I encountered it first during my martial arts training. A person attacks you with a bokken. Your task is to move aside the path the bokken hits. If you escape too early, uke can notice you and correct the path of his sword. If you escape too late, well, you won’t manage to escape. You can only know when to escape by knowing when his sword can no longer fix its destination, a matter of milliseconds. This is only possible by being fully aware solely on the present. Only on uke’s movement. Zero thought about that tv show you’ve watched or the book you’ve read and what about that application to Stanford you’ve been meaning to write? BAM the sword hits your head.

I’ve spent my army service reading great minds. Leibniz, Kant, Machiavelli, Descartes and my favorite: Nietzsche. None of them affected me more than my first reading – Zen and the art.

It combined science, Asian philosophy and actual philosophy in an almost harmonic blend. Yet I disagree with Pirsig. So what is good Pheadrus? Quality is an evolutionary tool designed to give us positive feedback that helps us determine how one thing can raise our fitness. Quality or beautiful women, for example, are those who seem young, rich and healthy. Flowing hair, smooth skin, clothing that represent high social status etc. A good cocoon for the male offspring to survive in. Quality is the reduction of the complex thinking process our brain commits, analyzing many attributes and scalaric variables, into a simple good and bad scale.

I see martial arts as the creative expression of classical mechanics. The karate punch is the enormous power of the moment of inertia and aikido’s Kaiten Nage is the implementation of moment. An aikido or judo’s battle is a lot of time the struggle to place the center of mass below that of your opponent.

But the Japanese didn’t see it in terms of forces, energy and momentum but with Ki. Many rationalists spurn such ideas. Mainly because they are unscientific and associated with alternative medicine and religious babble. Unexperimental? Maybe. But very empirical. The Japanese observed some phenomenon’s and explained them with theories such as the Ki flow. A punch is far stronger when moving the hip, thus it’s logical to assume that the hip is the center of the Ki.

And for the materialists who read this – yes, you are right. It is metaphysical bullshit. But here’s the thing: it works. And that’s exactly where Mushin comes into place. The Japanese know quality techniques only by the same way we know them. By focusing on the present. By feeling the pain of a good technique, the loss of balance it causes, by the feeling it causes you (and probably by natural selection of bad techniques, yet I don’t think they had enough men to test every one of them in the field of battle). Nobody cares that the explanation is dumb because it’s practical. And if we’d ask Nietzsche, isn’t it what science all about? Instrumentalism? You can know something is quality only by placing that duck tortellini on your tongue and letting it melt by the juices of your saliva and the fine white wine while you listen to a cool sax playing. Not thinking of anything but the flavors you encounter.

Need we someone to tell us these things Phaedrus? Well there is science. The Japanese didn’t isolate all the parameters to find if Ki exists but we developed the most powerful tool of humanity.

My first love checked the whole psychological symptoms. I know, I’ve read them in search for answers. And with the first disappointment sprouted many new thoughts that ignited my brain. Got me thinking about my sexual attraction, the way I feel. Am I gay? Am I straight? What am I? Science helped me a lot classifying the different forms of attraction I felt. Storge, Agape, Pragma, Mania, Eros. But I couldn’t wire my brain and find exactly what a quality sexual partner for me is. Not even the simplest attribute in the definition, sex. The laymen can’t rely on science all the time. Some of their biggest decisions count on feeling the present and deciding. That’s the best form for them. You can’t learn biochemistry for years to cook for your wife. You need to close your eyes and let the taste buds lead you.

But is it possible for science to answer the great questions? To tell us these things?

Neurology seems very affective in that area. Its functionality in the field of quality research is only starting to appear today but we can still see its power. Especially in the advertisement world. Many mad men use its power to make thing appear quality or good to us. That quality over sugary, acidic beverage you had with your quality low-meat high sodium burger a few days ago.

And then there is the naturalistic fallacy. Or maybe not a fallacy. Not as much as thinking sweet meals are good. What seems natural is good. Ask a film critic what is good script writing and he’ll answer My Dinner with Andrei, or Pulp Fiction or Seinfeld. Because they assimilate the way we talk and express ourselves far better than that melodramatic shacksperian monologue. They randomness is somehow very natural. I don’t believe science can create what we consider natural due to the chaos and randomness of its essence. If we’d reduce our experience to the parameters that we consider when we look at quality and serve each parameter the best using the scientific method, we’d may get a quality thing but we won’t consider it quality because it would be unnatural and thus seen as bad. Ironically, indeed without evil there is no good. With no flaws in the creation there is no beauty and perfection is a sin.

And could we contain the entire process our brain does when assessing quality? It’s a big word containing many different objects, ideas and phenomenon’s we encounter. They are not always and usually aren’t separated by our minds. The Japanese simplified the mechanical world through the use of Ki. Is it possible we can only achieve simplification of an infinite and complicated equation consisting of infinite number of parameters that include cultural and psychological background, genetics and thinking processes we are not aware of? Where there are too many variables, statistics come into hand. We may not be able to assess every person, his every sickness and give him the exact remedy for him but we can assess the like hood of him being sick with X disease and that cure Y will help him. We can create a state very close to quality for each individual built of statistical analysis of his attributes.

And yet, what good is quality? Vaccines may not be quality. We may suffer greatly from them but they consist a higher good for us that raises our fitness. Quality as a survival tool is flawed due to the fact that there are low-quality tools that help us and if we’d examine them in the mushin state it would hurt us.

The science helps us achieve this higher good. It’s not always enjoyable but it helps us survive. The science can even make our life more comforting. Maybe even much more fun. But elevating? This we have to leave for the arts. I believe we could never see the science truly capturing the power of Siegfried and Odette dancing under the moon light. Those things that make us feel awe inside. Those we leave for the human mind to judge. We can only intensify the gazing on the infinite stars in the sky by the simple Mushin.