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Spiritual Disciplines

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Spiritual Disciplines

These all have something in common. Now a martial art may be practised solely as a system of fighting techniques, and there is nothing wrong with that if fighting techniques are what you wish to learn. But sometimes martial arts can be more than that, once they take on aspects of, say, Buddhism, as many disciplines of Kung Fu do. The purpose of this section is to discuss the spiritual side of what these disciplines have in common: what makes a discipline a Spiritual Discipline, and why that matters. For me, the Spiritual aspect of life is the most important: our legacy is what we leave behind for others when we are gone. A Spiritual mindset focuses one on the big picture of life, to the extent that the individual becomes a minor detail. Just as pixels make up a tiny part of a computer image, so our individual lives make up a tiny part of life and humanity in general. And it is the overall picture that matters, not whether an individual pixel is red, white, or black. To see ourselves this way is not natural: we are naturally selfish, or focused on small groups of which we are members. To see ourselves as part of a greater whole is, for me, a major purpose of Spiritual Discipline: transforming oneself from the selfish humanoid animal that is our biological inheritance into a selfless, loving being. I can't say that I'm close to being fully transformed in that way, but Spiritual Discipline plays a major part in orienting me towards such a goal. Then, the sensitive, mindful aspect of these disciplines, as exemplified in Taiji and Mindful practices, equips us to live our lives in harmony with the world around us, so that our efforts to make the world better for everybody else add constructively to the efforts of others to do the same. The Spiritual Harmony side of Spiritual Disciplines is not about feeling nice, per se, though that can happen, but about living in such a way that the results of our actions add constructively and beneficially to the results of others' actions.