Trailer for New Documentary -- Manifesting the Mind

I was really quite impressed with this and the folks interviewed in the trailer make a lot of great points.

An Interview with Adyashanti

This one's for you Dad!

Obama To Hold Job Performance Review With Every American Worker

Seeing Being

So what now? Totally asleep . .. I know the way back. Keep coming back again and again. Deepen the awakening to include all aspects of being. Don't identify even with your reactions to being awake or asleep -- they are just more sleeping and dreaming. The moment you say "This is it!" it isn't. I want to try to clarify that more because I have seen it more clearly than that. Maybe it's because the moment you think that, however subtly, you create a false dichotomy between yourself and the awakeness.

When it comes down to it what is really the essential part of you? What is the foundation on which all concepts of self are based? Isn't it only the simple fact of Being, alone, unadorned, so common it is neglected by almost everyone? It is so simple but just seeing it once will not set you free. The habits of a lifetime of ignorance are reverberating inside you. They are neither good nor evil. Your value judgements about them are just another habit. But we are creatures of habit, aren't we? A person who knows they have tasted awakeness but has not embraced it is like an inmate in a prison where there are no guards and no warden. All the doors stand open and the prisoner continues to shuffle around in his cell, or perhaps the hallway, mostly dreaming that he is still a prisoner. Sometimes he sees the Truth and shuffles closer to the Final Exit. The fear is intense and at time seems all consuming. It seems the prison is all he has ever known and if he walks through that final door he will leave everything behind. Who will he be? How will he live? Where will he go?

So many questions they could be contemplated for a lifetime, or perhaps forever. Perhaps they have been already. Perhaps we have been standing at the door all this time and now all that is needed is one step.

Parkour and CST/Russian Martial Arts

It turns out that I am not the only one who has noticed the similarities between the Russian martial arts, Scott Sonnon's CST and the practice of Parkour. Here is an article by Dan Edwardes over at Parkour Generations on the similarities between CST and Parkour:

Le Parkour (1), though crystallised into its current guise by Frenchmen David Belle and Yann Hnautra sometime in the 1980s, is a practice the roots of which precede records. It has drawn on a myriad of sources, been inspired by a number of notable individuals and evolved through several traditions to arrive at the modern discipline now referred to as parkour or free-running. Names and labels come and go, of course, and the outward visage of this discipline has shifted and modified itself countless times. However, behind whatever appearance has been fashionable at the time, at its core there has always existed an eternal constant – the means, the end, the method and the goal of parkour: Movement.

You can read the rest of the article here.

I have been thinking a lot recently that the combination of CST/Russian martial arts and Parkour would be the ultimate martial art. To bring it all together I would add the nature awareness training of Tom Brown Jr. (in particular the Scout training), and Jon Young.