There is an ancient martial arts phrase, when the student is ready the master will appear. Sounds pretty good, eh? You get so good that some ancient master pops out of the woodwork and passes along the sacred teaching!
The truth of the matter, however is not quite as it sounds. In fact, the truth of the matter is nothing but odd. Let me tell you how this thing really works.
In the early seventies I was sitting on a cinder block in my backyard, tapping a piece of rebar on the patio and listening to music. Clunk, clung...and the world turned golden and I couldn't tell where the music was coming from. Everything I knew suddenly went by the wayside, and I realized that I had had a moment of enlightenment.
And, about that time, my instructor closed his fists. So, here I was, an enlightened human type fellow, and I didn't know where to go to get my next lesson. Hey, the student was ready, so when was this doggoned master gonna make his appearance?
Then an odd thing happened. People started telling me what to do. Whenever I was in a quandary, some fellow, not necessarily a martial artist, would come up out of the blue and tell me the exact thing I needed to know to understand my next step.
I was teaching a karate class one day, and I looked out the window, and there was a guy doing kung fu. I went out, introduced myself, and he turned out to be a kung fu master, and he taught me his system. And, in a bizarre oddity, it turned out that what he taught me was the exact thing that had been next to learn in my original system before my instructor retired.
And this thing, of people telling me what next to do entered all areas of my life, giving me a life that was entirely bizarre but totally golden. I would go to a buy an vehicle, know that the salesman was full of goose droppings, and suddenly some other customer would draw my attention to another car, or tell me about another dealer, and, suddenly, everything in the universe seemed balanced and right. The master had appeared, and the master was humanity, and humanity never led me astray.
So this thing of when the student is ready the master will appear is true, but its not what you think at all. People, as a race, are a pure magnitudious explosion of consciousness, and, when taken as a whole, and a person who has been enlightened will tend to take them in that manner, they are the master. All of us, we are connected by a consciousness that we do not usually perceive, and even turn away from when we do, and yet this is the secret of where we are going, We are part of a Cosmic Mind, a consciousness that is God, and when the martial arts are done in the correct manner, and this can be ascertained by whether they lead to enlightenment, humanity knows what you need, and it gives you what is necessary.
Al Case has over more than 4O++ years experience in the martial arts. If you wish to enter the Cosmic Mind, visit either Church of the Martial Arts, or pick upa free ebook at Monster Martial Arts.
