Chinese kung fu fans

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 a wee bit different. In fact, the truth of the matter is downright bizarre. Let me tell you how it really works.

In the mid seventies I was sitting on a cinder block in my backyard, tapping a length of rebar on the patio and listening to music. Donk, donk…and the world glowed golden and I couldn’t tell where the music was coming from. Everything I knew suddenly became irrelevant, and I realized that I had had a moment of enlightenment.

And, about that time, my instructor retired. So, here I was, an enlightened being, and I didn’t know where to go to get my lesson. Hey, the student was ready, so where was the master?

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 class in Karate one day, and I looked out the window, and a guy was doing in the parking lot doing gung fu. I went out, introduced myself, and he turned out to be a master, and he taught me his style. And, in a bizarre circumstance, he taught me the exact thing that had been next to learn in my system before my instructor retired.

And this thing, of people telling me what to do entered all aspects of my life, giving me a life that was entirely bizarre but totally golden. I would go to a buy an auto, know that the salesman was full of cow chips, 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 he was humanity, and humanity never led me wrong.

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.