Establishing Inner Peace

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“If you can't develop a level of inner-peace then you'll have little hope of  establishing peace with others.” - Michael Clarke, Shinseidokan Dojo

Michael Clarke Sensei stated and asked most eloquently, “Maintaining (inner) peace, like most things is more difficult than you can imagine; and yet, is this not what you tell others karate is all about?” Clarke Sensei hit it on the nose, inner peace is that something often articulated yet not actually taught. I don’t think you can teach others or learn from others how to create within yourself, “Inner Peace.” 

When I consider our modern times and our emotional immaturity as a species, i.e., we succumb to the nature of emotions rather than make constructive use of them, as if the monkey brain rules the roost while our human brains of logic just simply, “Give up.” 

To truly learn, understand and apply self-defense humans MUST look within first before they can even attempt to look elsewhere. More often conflict and its sometimes resulting violence comes from our lack of inner peach and a total lack of understanding of our emotional sides as they work with our logical side. 

The logical human brain is a fairly new evolutionary addition mother nature has provided but the more ancient monkey emotional brain is far older and far more established in the status and hierarchy of our brains functions. The monkey is not going to give up its status and it isn’t even considering the possibility of “Sharing” the functions of the brain. You have to take control and train the brain to work toward its mutual benefit and survival. 

The complexities of our modern technologically driven world make that most difficult. For instance, historically and on an evolutionary scale humans think in a linear way. I quote, “From our days on the plains of the Serengeti, we’ve intuitively done linear calculations in our heads to determine the best path to escape from a charging lion. But that is not the world in which we live today.”

Our modern times with all the technology that far exceeds the very nature of human existence makes life difficult and we are struggling in a linear way to keep up when the technological social environment is non-linear and becoming more so and far more complex than nature can keep up with leaving us struggling thus achieve greater stresses and emotional dominance over our logical sides. Considering the slow evolutionary processes of nature it will be a very long time before we can evolve to the next higher level of brain function creating a brain that will be a balanced mixture of logic driven emotional state of mind. 

Another quotation of note, “Human being heretofore have developed evolutionarily to think in  a linear fashion; it’s been coded into our brain since the dawn of mankind.” 

Inner peace is being driven farther and farther from our consciousness and that leaves us little coping ability to combat the stresses that are consuming us and leaving us in an emotional tsunami that will drive us toward more and more violence to get what we want to achieve instant gratifying self-serving egoistic goals. This is the absolute opposite of our goals as humans and as karate-ka and martial artists. 

It comes down to an individual needing to be informed that inner peace is critical to all things especially in conflict and violence but then they need to find that inner peace themselves. You can lead them to methodologies that will create doors and windows open to the possibility of inner peace but each individual still has to open the doors and windows to let inner peace in then achieve a proficiency that will allow them to walk out that door to live inner peace. Only then can one achieve a way that gives meaning to the practice of any discipline but no more so than the one that comes from karate and martial arts as they are best suited for handling conflict and violence. You can look at inner peace as another sub-principle of the fundamental principles of multiple defense methodologies. 

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