10 At the presentation of some of these ideas and practices at a conference in Albuquerque, a participant asked me, “George, why warrior?” His question stuck with me , became my koan — a problem to solve, or dissolve. I went through the standard responses: (1) it’s what I know and if others don’t use warrior language they can translate it to their own language; I don’t mean warrior in the destructive sense; (2) a warrior is one who faces and deals with whatever arises; (3) warriors have a respectable place in the spiritual traditions of various cultures (Arjuna in the Bhagavad –Gita; “put on the whole armor of God” in the Christian tradition; Jesus telling his disciples it was time to get a sword; Shaolin warrior-priests, and so on).
All these responses are fine and good, as far as they go. But they don’t go very far — they continue to reverberate within the confines of the warrior construct itself. And some don’t want to go anywhere near that construct and if they do, they get uncomfortable in using a predator language (as one participant put it). So I kept chewing on that hard dry nut of a koan — Why Warrior? I could just as readily have used “adventurer” or “sojourner” or “intranaut.” Warriors, however, have a structured discipline, a language, specific practices, and written accounts (data) of their experiments in facing and engaging any situation. Only those whose experiments succeeded left records. Warriorship is an exact and an exacting science. In essence, I trust the data.
11 I am indebted to Dharmaraksita, composer of The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, to its translation across the centuries from Sanskrit to Tibetan into English, and to Cynthia Knox for bringing this text to my attention [see Dharmaraksita, The Wheel of Sharp Weapons: A Mahayana Training of the Mind. Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Indraprastha Press, Nehru House: New Delhi, 1981]. Though the wheel I use arose from the warrior qualities depicted in the martial and spiritual arts, I have adapted its title from the work of Dharmaraksita, for the existence of which I am deeply grateful.
12 Structural use of an octogram to display universal principles has been employed by others. (1) The Fivefold Law of hand-to-hand combat and Eight Divine Coordinates of Kashima-Shinryu show, in their depiction of “spiritual martial power” that the martial arts are a path for engaging the divine in daily living (Friday and Humitake, 1997). (2) Book II of Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching gives a reference to and depiction of Fu Hsi’s octagonal arrangement leading to the development of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching. Not only was the structure and form an octogram similar to The Wheel of Keen Weapons, but the content was similar enough to be regarded as further validation. (3) The Eight Powers of Shinto are diagrammed and described by Osensei Ueshiba, founder of Aikido (Stevens, 1999) and by William Gleason (1995). (4) Raimundo Panikkar (1977) gives a drawing of a spoked “wheel of the cosmos” with earth depicted below and heaven above from the Rig Vedas. (5) The eight-spoked wheel is an age-old symbol of Buddhism.
13 See Note 11.
14 What Jesus called the kingdom of heaven and many have referred to as supernatural, I am calling primary reality and unitive consciousness. Separative consciousness (secondary reality) is the sickness that has beset us. Unitive consciousness (primary reality) is the antidote, the healing.
Separative consciousness involves experienced awareness of a distinct, seemingly unbridgeable distance between self and others, experiencing self as a particle rather than a wave (to use a physics metaphor), experiencing others as objects (I-It relationships), and engaging in behavior promoting social isolation. Separative consciousness experiences the world as profane (“outside the temple”), as not sacred.
Unitive consciousness involves being in relationship with everyone and everything, feeling at home in the universe, being deeply grounded and centering while open to all that exists, experiencing self and others (including so-called insentient beings) as kin (I-Thou relationships), experiencing oneself as a “wave” rather than a particle, engaging in behavior promoting social harmony, and experiencing the world as sacred.
A subset or forerunner of unitive consciousness, relationship consciousness (comprehending the systemic nature of life, that everything is in relation), is both an area of practice and a vehicle for moving toward and opening to unitive consciousness.
Separative and unitive consciousness can be seen as anchoring the ends of a dimension:
Separative _____________________________________________ Unitive
As such, one’s consciousness state is generally in flux on that dimension. A given person’s consciousness state may habitually occupy one portion, one range of that dimension. Some persons may habitually exist in separative consciousness. Others may have unitive consciousness as their general state. Still others may fluctuate between the two depending on their current situation. Embodying the qualities depicted in The Wheel of Keen Weapons moves one toward unitive consciousness.
