Unlock the power of the will. Learn balance and gain the knowledge and wisdom necessary to guide those powers, to succeed in sports and athletics.
Any good athletic is always in a state of perpetual training, as is the Zen student.
Thought control is the ability to direct mind and attention anywhere. Your ability to win is dependent upon the power of your concentration. Winning is a state of mind.
The Frisbee is a round disk. That’s the somethingness. But it has another side; it has a nothingness which you cannot perceive with your physical mind or your senses.
In the game of Frisbee you throw the disk to someone else. The point of Frisbee is perfect communication. The person at the other end of the field is receiving an impression, a vibration from you.
The more perfectly you can refine the process of Frisbee, the tighter your energy is and the more you become one with the nothingness of the Frisbee, the nothingness of the play.
Your ego interferes, your sense of self. When you let go of the mind, the Frisbee will take its own path.
When you unite the nothingness of your mind with the nothingness of the Frisbee, then the Frisbee is not a Frisbee, and you are not you.
You are trying to pierce the veil, to break through the Frisbee so that it doesn’t exist, to break through the football so it doesn’t exist, and to break through your opponent so they don’t exist.
Transform yourself. It is not the opponent that will change, or the Frisbee. They will change in relation to your change. You must change.
Zen and Buddhism have produced martial arts, because of the Buddhist injunction against weapons.
Most martial arts have to do with the mind, ultimately. The ability to be unafraid, to walk away from a fight without fear – that is control.
If you are afraid of other people take a martial arts class. The best way to overcome fear is learn to be proficient in martial arts.
The best martial artist doesn’t win fights, but avoids fights. Martial arts is a way of gaining basic self-mastery of your mind, body and emotions. It can also be very useful in combat situations.
Use the practice of mind and body; in order to make those moves perfectly, you have to pull your mind out of its mundane thoughts and awarenesses and bring it into the body movement.
The very advanced practitioners of martial arts never had to raise a hand. They could knock an opponent down without physically touching them, just with chi, pure power. We don’t see too many of them anymore.
The samurais lived with death constantly. They wore a short dagger to take their own life if need be. At any moment they might have to do that, it was a part of their code.
The samurais were very interested in Zen because they admired the tremendous precision that the Zen Masters had, their lack of fear and pain and their absolute lack of fear of death.
The chi is the central energy or power that we use in physical expression. When the chi is flowing properly in our lives, we can be very adept athletically.
If the chi is being wasted by useless activities, emotions and associations that drain us, then we don’t have enough power when it comes time to perform.