Where Have Our Warriors Gone?
{Via Pinterest}
It is said that when two great martial artists meet in combat, the fight is decided before the first blow.
The battle takes place in the mind, like a master chess player that anticipates your moves before you make them. A championship boxing match is publicized for months before a punch is thrown, with each boxer offering verbal jabs long before the fight.
Now, is this for entertainment? Sure, but a boxer would be foolish not to attack his opponent’s psyche. The mind tells the body to act, and if you can goad your opponent to react to you, then you have an advantage.
The greatest athlete and competitor I ever saw, Michael Jordan, was famous for looking for any reason to dislike or even hate his opponent. You never challenged Michael Jordan publicly, and if you did, you were made fool of when you met him.
In our modern culture, this may be the closest we come to the embodiment of the warrior. Many of these athletes are now paid ludicrous amounts of money to compete, which blurs the lines between contest and entertainment. And with so many hands in the coffer, have many of our heroes lost the ideals that make them heroic?
The question pervades my mind — where is the battle and where have all the warriors gone?
I’m not a father, but one day I’d like to be. People often say to me that I’ll make a good dad. As if being a good father is above and beyond the responsibilities of a man… Is it? Is there another choice but to be the best possible father to your child?
I guess there is…
We met a man at dinner a few days ago who was sitting by himself. He was a loud but charming Irish man and we couldn’t help but become completely enchanted listening to his stories. He had the gift of the gab, to quote my mother, and he loved having an audience.
It was as if he felt that as the eldest statesman he should care for us — he even insisted on buying us dinner. He was in America making microchips, his work was demanding and he confided that he came to the bars almost every day after work.
So be it, who I am to judge, but then my heart dropped when he took out his smartphone and showed us pictures of his wife and two beautiful children. He was a proud family man that kept them well fed and yet there he was using his charm on me and my girlfriend.
One of the foundational texts on Yoga, The Bhagavad Gita, takes place on a great battlefield — the greatest war the world had ever known. In it, four million soldiers prepared to fight for a kingdom that had been unjustly stolen.
As the battle was about to commence the noble prince Arjuna hesitated, pondering the implications of this great battle. So many warriors would be killed, and he would have to fight some of his own family, friends and former teachers.
The entire battle freezes as Arjuna seeks guidance from his friend Krishna who we later find out is the Supreme Being. Their dialogue serves as one of the greatest testimonies to the power of love, faith, devotion, duty and the laws of karma (action).
To give you some background — Arjuna was trained as a warrior, the perfect student of his beloved guru and the archetypal yogi. Arjuna loved his guru and practiced all of his teachings until he perfected them. His guru would not teach any ordinary pupil.
He had rejected one student, saying “If I teach you the art and science of warfare, what are you going to use it for? It has to be used for the benefit of humanity, not to propagate more evil.”
Ahimsa, a yogic principle of nonviolence, is often misunderstood as pacifism. Can’t we use violence to stop a violent crime against another such as rape? It is a concept that requires complete devotion to a greater purpose, although it should be our last defense: there are righteous uses of violence.
This war juxtaposes this question — there Arjuna stands with a final chance to regain the kingdom stolen from his ruthless cousins, and yet he cannot decide if this warrants righteousness. He confesses his feelings of horror at making the wrong decision. This was his dharma (duty) to use his skills to take back his kingdom. A warrior that feels conflicted about war? It is the battlefield within.
My teacher often jokes about westerners who only took the physical postures of Yoga and ignored everything else. He describes the postures as condiments and says it is like serving your guest a bottle of ketchup and some Himalayan sea salt.
Even though The Bhagavad Gita is one of the foundational texts on Yoga, this is not how we see Yoga marketed. The modern yogi has been cast as a flexible and soft, kempt and middle class, generally Caucasian female, with earthy hair and makeup, wearing the latest leggings.
That’s not to say that this modern projection cannot be a yogi or a warrior, but let’s acknowledge that the image has been changed. When the subject of Yoga is broached, we do not imagine a noble warrior prince, we see multicolored rubber mats, blank smiling faces, and a five-star retreat center for the upwardly mobile. Has modern marketing tried to pacify the warrior?
I can say from experience that there is no doubt in my mind that we are all at war. There are physical battles being fought each day for the very right to survive or to feed a starving child (can you fucking imagine?). There is a very real mental battle to get out of bed, to keep going, to reserve judgment, to not lose faith in yourself and humanity.
To smile at that nagging impulse that says: “What’s the point?”
We are all battling our past. We are conditioned to see the past over and over again, even when the narrative changes. Why can’t I let go of this duplicitous familiarity? And why can’t I take a step forward on this earth without crushing the ants underneath me? And why are all my clothes from China?
There are so many righteous causes chipping at my heart — I feel like the boxer who will have to wait another three month before he sees his opponent’s face in the ring. Time can heal but time can also soften our resolve. It is the great equalizer. Be patient but stay sharp, great warrior.
Continue your training for the moment that you are called up to defend everything you believe is sacred.
*****
{Warrior School}
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