Bruce Lee: Organized Despair

Originally posted in May, 2012. 

The following is a lengthy excerpt from Tao of Jeet Kune Do, by Bruce Lee. I am posting this now because, as the end of the school year draws close, I've been reflecting on my teaching practices. I view Bruce Lee as one of my mentors, and I owe much of my success as a teacher to his ideas. Although Bruce Lee wrote what he wrote about martial arts, every single statement in this excerpt also applies to the art of teaching - and, I think, to the art of learning. 

I have chosen to include the entire chapter, even though I don't necessarily understand or agree with every statement therein. I chose to do this because I have found that every time I read Bruce Lee's writings, different statements jump out at me, and my understanding of what he says changes. I'd rather include more than less. Read with an open mind, and take Bruce Lee's advice: "Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is specifically your own."

Bear in mind that these were written as sequential statements - not as a flowing essay. It helps to pause briefly after every statement, to let it sink in. The italics are his.

Organized Despair

In the long history of martial arts, the instinct to follow and imitate seems to be inherent in most martial artists, instructors and students alike. This is partly due to human tendency and partly because of the steep traditions behind multiple patterns of styles. Consequently, to find a refreshing, original, master teacher is a rarity. The need for a “pointer of the way” echoes.

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 of “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.

When real feeling occurs, such as anger or fear, can the stylist express himself with the classical method, or is he merely listening to his own screams and yells? Is he a living, expressive human being or merely a patternized mechanical robot? Is he an entity capable of flowing with external circumstances, or is he resisting with his set of chosen patterns? Is his chosen pattern forming a screen between him and the opponent and preventing a “total” and “fresh” relationship?

Stylists, instead of looking directly into the fact, cling to forms (theories) and go on entangling themselves further and further, finally putting themselves into an inextricable snare.

They do not see it in its suchness because their indoctrination is crooked and twisted. Discipline must conform to the nature of things in their suchness.

Maturity does not mean to become a captive of conceptualization. It is the realization of what lies in our innermost selves.

When there is freedom from mechanical conditioning, there is simplicity. Life is a relationship to the whole.

The man who is clear and simple does not choose. What is, is. Action based on an idea is obviously the action of choice and such action is not liberating. On the contrary, it creates further resistance, further conflict. Assume pliable awareness.

Relationship is understanding. It is a process of self-revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself – to be is to be related.

Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all parameters.

Forms are vain repetitions which offer an orderly and beautiful escape from self-knowledge with an alive opponent.

Accumulation is self-enclosing resistance and flowery techniques strengthen the resistance.

The classical man is just a bundle of routine, ideas, and tradition. When he acts, he is translating every living moment in terms of the old.

Knowledge is fixed in time, whereas knowing is continual. Knowledge comes from a source, from an accumulation, from a conclusion, while knowing is a movement.

The additive process is merely a cultivation of memory which becomes mechanical. Learning is never cumulative; it is a movement of knowing which has no beginning and no end.

In martial arts cultivation, there must be a sense of freedom. A conditioned mind is never a free mind. Conditioning limits a person within the framework of a particular system.

To express yourself in freedom, you must die to everything of yesterday. From the “old”, you derive security; from the “new”, you gain the flow.

To realize freedom, the mind has to learn to look at life, which is a vast movement without the bondage of time, for freedom lies beyond the field of consciousness. Watch, but don’t stop and interpret, “I am free” – then you’re living in a memory of something that has gone. To understand and live now, everything of yesterday must die.

Freedom from knowing is death; then, you are living. Die inwardly of “pro” and “con.” There is no such thing as doing right or wrong when there is freedom.

When one is not expressing himself, he is not free. Thus, he begins to struggle and the struggle breeds methodical routine. Soon, he is doing his methodical routine as response rather than responding to what is.

The fighter is to always be single-minded with one object in view – to fight, looking neither backward nor sideways. He must get rid of obstructions to his forward movement, emotionally, physically, or intellectually.

One can function freely and totally if he is “beyond system.” The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is.

If you want to understand the truth in martial arts, to see any opponent clearly, you must throw away the notion of styles or schools, prejudices, likes and dislikes, and so forth. Then, your mind will cease all conflict and come to rest. In this silence, you will see totally and freshly.

If any style teaches you a method of fighting, then you might be able to fight according to the limit of that method, but that is not actually fighting.

If you meet the unconventional attack, such as one delivered with broken rhythm, with your chosen patterns of rhythmical classical blocks, your defense and counterattack will always be lacking pliability and aliveness.

If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow – you are not understanding yourself.

How can one respond to the totality with partial, fragmentary pattern?

Mere repetition of rhythmic, calculated movements robs combat movement of its “aliveness” and “isness” – its reality.

Accumulation of forms, just one more modification of conditioning, becomes an anchor that holds and ties down; it leads only one way – down.

Form is the cultivation of resistance; it is the exclusive drilling of a pattern of choice moves. Instead of creating resistance, enter straight into the movement as it arises; do not condemn or condone – choiceless awareness leads to reconciliation with the opponent in a total understanding of what is.

Once conditioned in a partialized method, once isolated in an enclosing pattern, the practitioner faces his opponent through a screen of resistance – he is “performing” his stylized blocks and listening to his own screaming and not seeing what the opponent is really doing.

We are those kata, we are those classical blocks and thrusts, so heavily conditioned are we by them.

To fit in with an opponent one needs direct perception. There is no direct perception where there is a resistance, a “this is the only way” attitude.

Having totality means being capable of following “what is,” because “what is” is constantly moving and constantly changing. If one is anchored to a particular view, one will not be able to follow the swift movement of “what is.”

Whatever one’s opinion of hooking and swinging as part of one’s style, there cannot be the least argument to acquiring perfect defenses against it. Indeed, nearly all natural fighters use it. As for the martial artist, it adds versatility to his attack. He must be able to hit from wherever his hand is.

But in classical styles, system becomes more important than the man! The classical man functions with the pattern of a style!

How can there be methods and systems to arrive at something that is living? To that which is static, fixed, dead, there can be a way, a definite path, but not to that which is living. Do not reduce reality to a static thing and then invent methods to reach it.

Truth is relationship with the opponent; constantly moving, living, never static.

Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. It has no resting place, no form, no organized institution, no philosophy. When you see that, you will understand that this living thing is also what you are. You cannot express and be alive through static, put-together form, through stylized movement.

Classical forms dully your creativity, condition and freeze your sense of freedom. You no longer “be,” but merely “do,” without sensitivity.

Just as yellow leaves may be gold coins to stop the crying children, thus, the so-called secret moves and contorted postures appease the unknowledgeable martial artists.

This does not mean to do nothing at all, but only to have no deliberate mind in whatever one does. Do not have a mind that selects or rejects. To be without deliberate mind is to hang no thoughts.

Acceptance, denial and conviction prevent understanding. Let your mind move together with another’s in understanding with sensitivity. Then, there is a possibility of real communication. To understand one another, there must be a state of choiceless awareness where there is no sense of comparison or condemnation, no waiting for a further development of discussion in order to agree or disagree. Above all, don’t start from a conclusion.

Understand the freedom from the conformity of styles. Free yourself by observing closely what you normally practice. Do not condemn or approve; merely observe.

When you are uninfluenced, when you die to the conditioning of classical responses, then you will know awareness and see things totally fresh, totally new.

Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. Perception alone will resolve all our problems.

Understanding requires not just a moment of perception, but a continuous awareness, a continuous state of inquiry without conclusion.

To understand combat, one must approach it in a very simple and direct response.

Understanding comes about through feeling, from moment to moment in the mirror of relationship.

Understanding oneself happens through a process of relationship and not through isolation.

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

To understand the actual requires awareness, an alert and totally free mind.

Effort within the mind further limits the mind, because effort implies struggle towards a goal and when you have a goal, a purpose, an end in view, you have placed a limit on the mind.

This evening I see something totally new and that newness is experienced by the mind, but tomorrow that experience becomes mechanical if I try to repeat the sensation, the pleasure of it. The description is never real. What is real is seeing the truth instantaneously, because truth has no tomorrow.

We shall find the truth when we examine the problem. The problem is never apart from the answer. The problem is the answer – understanding the problem dissolves the problem.

Observe what is with undivided awareness.

True thusness is without defiling thought; it cannot be known through conception and thought.

Thinking is not freedom – all thought is partial; it can never be total. Thought is the response of memory and memory is always partial, because memory is the result of experience. So, thought is the reaction of a mind conditioned by experienced.

Know the emptiness and tranquility of your mind. Be empty; have no style or form for the opponent to work on.

The mind is originally without activity; the way is always without thought.

Insight is realizing that one’s original nature is not created.

There will be calmness, tranquility, when one is free from external objects and is not perturbed. Being tranquil means not having any illusions or delusions of thusness.

There is no thought, only thusness – what is. Thusness does not move, but its motion and function are inexhaustible.

To meditate means to realize the imperturbability of one’s original nature. Surely, meditation can never be a process of concentration, because the highest form of thinking is negation. Negation is a state in which there is neither the positive, nor its reaction as the negative. It is a state of complete emptiness.

Concentration is a form of exclusion and where there is exclusion, there is a thinker who excludes. It is the thinker, the excluder, the one who concentrates, who creates contradiction because he forms a center from which there is distraction.

There is a state of action without the actor, a state of experiencing without the experience or the experience. It is a state bound and weighted down by the classical mess.

Classical concentration that focuses on one thing and excludes all others, and awareness, which is total and excludes nothing, are states of the mind that can be understood only by objective, non-prejudiced observation.

Awareness has no frontier; it is a giving of your whole being, without exclusion.

Concentration is a narrowing down of the mind. But we are concerned with the process of living and to concentrate exclusively on any particular aspect of life, belittles life.

The “moment” has not yesterday or tomorrow. It is not the result of thought and, therefore, has not time.

When, in a split second, your life is threatened, do you say, “Let me make sure my hand is on my hip, and my style is ‘the’ style”? When your life is in danger, do you argue about the method you will adhere to while saving yourself? Why the duality?

A so-called martial artist is the result of three thousand years of propaganda and conditioning.

Why do individuals depend on thousands of years of propaganda? They may preach “softness” as the ideal to “firmness,” but when “what is” hits, what happens? Ideals, principles, the “what should be” leads to hypocrisy.

Because one does not want to be disturbed, to be made uncertain, he establishes a pattern of conduct, of thought, a pattern of relationships to man. He then becomes a slave to the pattern and takes the pattern to be the real thing.

Agreeing to certain patterns of movement to secure the participants within the governed rules might be good for sports like boxing or basketball, but the success of Jeet Kune Do lies in its freedom, both to use technique and to dispense with it.

The second-hand artist blindly following his sensei or sifu accepts his pattern. As a result, his action, and more importantly, his thinking become mechanical. His response becomes automatic, according to set patterns, making him narrow and limited.

Self-expression is total, immediate, without conception of time, and you can only express that if you are free, physically and mentally, from fragmentation.