Bruce Lee (1940 – 1973)
Chinese American martial artist and actor who is widely regarded as the most influential martial artist of the 20th century.
Concepts vs. self-actualization. Instead of dedicating your life to actualize a concept of what you should be like, ACTUALIZE YOURSELF. The process of maturing does not mean to become a captive of conceptualization. It is to come to the realization of what lies in our innermost selves.
Life is better lived than conceptualized. This writing can be less demanding should I allow myself to indulge in the usual manipulating game of role creation. Fortunately for me, my self-knowledge has transcended that and I've come to understand that life is best to be lived not to be conceptualized. If you have to think, you still do not understand.
I wouldn't have put a dime on anyone to beat Bruce Lee in a real confrontation. Bruce Lee was the best street fighter I ever saw, even to this very day, and not just pound for pound but against anyone in a real fight.
The change is from inner to outer. We start by dissolving our attitude not by altering outer conditions.
Jeet Kune Do rejects all restrictions imposed by form and formality and emphasizes the clever use of the mind and body to defend and attack.
You have to keep your reflexes so that when you want it its there. When you want to move you are moving. And when you move, you are determined to move! Not accepting even one inch less than 100 percent of your honest feelings. Not anything less than that. So that is the type of thing you have to train yourself into. To become one with your feelings so that, when you think it is.
Of course youre there. Death is always there. So why was I afraid? Your leap is swift. Your claws are sharp and merciful. What can you take from me which is not already yours? . . . Everything I have done until now has been fruitless. It has led to nothing. There was no other path except that it led to nothing and before me now there is only one real fact Death. The truth I have been seeking this truth is Death. Yet Death is also a seeker. Forever seeking me. So we have met at last. And I am prepared. I am at peace. Because I will conquer death with death.
There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.
You must have complete determination. The worst opponent you can come across is one whose aim has become an obsession. For instance, if a man has decided that he is going to bite off your nose no matter what happens to him in the process, the chances are he will succeed in doing it. He may be severely beaten up, too, but that will not stop him from carrying out his objective. That is the real fighter.
The aphorism "as a man thinketh in his heart so is he" contains the secret of life.
What IS is more important than WHAT SHOULD BE. To many people are looking at "what is" from a position of thinking "what should be."
Balance your thoughts with action. If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done.
True thusness is the substance of thought, and thought is the function of true thusness. There is no thought except that of true thusness. Thusness does not move, but its motion and function are inexhaustible.
To contemplate a thing implies maintaining oneself OUTSIDE it, resolved to keep a distance between it and ourselves.
Liberate yourself from concepts and see the truth with your own eyes. It exists HERE and NOW; it requires only one thing to see it: openness, freedom the freedom to be open and not tethered by any ideas, concepts, etc. ... When our mind is tranquil, there will be an occasional pause to its feverish activities, there will be a let-go, and it is only then in the interval between two thoughts that a flash of UNDERSTANDING understanding, which is not thought can take place.
In Science we have finally come back to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who said everything is flow, flux, process. There are no "things." NOTHINGNESS in Eastern language is "no-thingness". We in the West think of nothingness as a void, an emptiness, an nonexistence. In Eastern philosophy and modern physical science, nothingness no-thingness is a form of process, ever moving.
In Jeet Kune Do, its not how much you have learned, but how much you have absorbed from what you have learned. It is not how much fixed knowledge you can accumulate, but what you can apply livingly that counts. Being is more valued than "doing".
A self-willed man obeys a different law, the one law I, too, hold absolutely sacred the human law in himself, his own individual will.
Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.
True thusness is without defiling thought; it cannot be known through conception and thought.