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To: alt.magick.chaos From: hamlet@tatertot.com (Brian M Oldham) Subject: Organized Despair (9407.orgdspr.bl) Date: 49940716 Quoting: Bruce Lee Last night I was studying my copy of THE TAO OF JEET KUNE DO by BRUCE LEE, and I fixated on a section in chapter one (On Zen), called "Organized Despair". I thought that what Master Lee said about martial arts applies heavily to magical arts, so I have reprinted the section here for the curious (in the book it's on pages 14-15)... To fully appreciate this, you should substitute the word "combat" with the word "magick" wherever it appears in the following text: ---------------------------------------------------------------- from THE TAO OF JEET KUNE DO by BRUCE LEE On Zen / Organized Despair (pages 14-15) Each man belongs to a style which claims to possess truth to the exclusion of all other styles. These styles become institutes with their explanations of the "Way," dissecting and isolating the harmony of firmness and gentleness, establishing rhythmic forms as the particular state of their techniques. Instead of facing combat in its suchness, then, most systems of martial art accumulate a "fancy mess" that distorts and cramps their practitioners and distracts them from the actual reality of combat, which is simple and direct. Instead of going immediately to the heart of things, flowery forms (organized despair) and artificial techniques are ritualistically practiced to simulate actual combat. Thus, instead if "being" in combat these practitioners are "doing" something "about" combat. Worse still, super mental power and spiritual this and spiritual that are desperately incorporated until these practitioners drift further and further into mystery and abstraction. All such things are futile attempts to arrest and fix the ever-changing movements in combat and to dissect and analyze them like a corpse. When you get down to it, real combat is not fixed and is very much "alive." The fancy mess (a form of paralysis) solidifies and conditions what was once fluid, and when you look at it realistically, it is nothing but a blind devotion to the systematic uselessness of practicing routines or stunts that lead nowhere. ---------------------------------------------------------------- hamlet
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