iamom | on enlightenment and self-mastery

The current issue of Andrew Cohen's magazine, What is Enlightenment?, has a great interview with a martial arts master named Vernon Kitabu Turner, to whom the secret of self-defense "from the inside out" was revealed in a blaze of light during meditation. With no previous formal training in any of the martial arts, Kitabu put this realization to the test with a number of martial arts masters. In what must have been quite a show to watch, he was invited to participate in a "trial by combat" sanctioned by the highest-ranking sensei on the Board of Dojo Organizations, and he successfully defeated all of his opponents; one trial saw him take on six seasoned black belts simultaneously. When he asked his opponents what they felt when they attacked him, they said, "It's like you weren't there - I thought I had you, but then you were gone!"

The very well-conducted interview focuses not on the excitement of those defeats, but rather on Kitabu's understanding of the relationship between enlightenment and self-mastery. His clarity of vision and expression on this relationship is a joy to read.

Interviewer: What, in your view, is the relationship between enlightenment and self-mastery?
Kitabu: Well, enlightenment, first of all, is coming to understand that there is no self in the conventional sense of the word. People tend to think of the self as, "Well, I'm the guy who went to this high school and had these parents, and I'm the guy who's got an accounting degree, and I worked my way through it all and achieved these things." Now that's purely an illusory self that we're talking about. Enlightenment is coming to understand or experience that there is no objective self--there is being, but there's no objective self--and it's in the process of letting go of that notion that one experiences what one truly is in the universal sense. That's when enlightenment comes--when you realize that you are not in control. And because of that, you are very much in control.

Interviewer: And how would you distinguish that from self-mastery?
Kitabu: Well, enlightenment is the opening up of the eye of perception to the ultimate reality of existence itself. But on the finite scale, the application would be self-mastery. In the enlightenment aspect of it, there's no one there--there is no you to operate as opposed to this person or that person; your experience is complete, it's whole, it contains the cosmos. But when this enlightenment expresses itself in form, as in walking down the street, speaking and carrying oneself, then its light shines through the eyes of a single entity, and that is when it is known as "self-mastery."

What a great working definition of enlightenment that is: Enlightenment is the opening up of the eye of perception to the ultimate reality of existence itself. As the interview continues, Kitabu expands further on how this understanding of no-self (aka "Not I" or "neti-neti") is manifest in his day-to-day actions and life. The interview reads like a modern-day translation of the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao Te Ching.

While I don't personally aspire to become a martial arts master, I took away a lot of practical stuff from the interview, mainly to do with diet and exercise. Like so many people on this side of the hemisphere, I consistently eat more than I require for my activities, and reading Kitabu's words made me think more clearly about the detachment I could successfully employ in my own daily life with respect to what I eat. I'm experimenting with that today, also along the lines of what

fey wrote about last week, and I wonder if this no-self approach to eating and exercise might be what will work for me to achieve the physical balance I'm looking for in this regard.