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• Sunday, Aug 23: IS Community Call 23.7
• Friday, Aug 28: Open IS Connection Call
• Sunday, Sept 13: IS Web Quarterly Convening

The previous newsletter was "Money Stories" and our Community Call last Sunday was titled "Unleashing love".

“The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.”
― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

If one doesn't understand how to bring about their aims but hopes that imitating the form (of those who do) will suffice, that's cargo culting. But if one does possess a theory of change, there is still another kind of trying that is subtly different than actually succeeding.

I'll use the word "effectiveness" as a pointer to the thing here, and its meaning has been illustrated in (also martial arts) media:

"Stop trying to hit me and hit me."
— Morpheus, The Matrix

"Kick me."
— Bruce Lee, Enter the Dragon

Or of course,

"Do. Or do not. There is no try."
— Yoda, Star Wars

This is also a bit different from inefficiency, where one is doing things that clearly don't matter. Ineffective "trying" really is trying to do the thing that matters as best as one can discern.

"Cut the enemy" effectiveness results in impact and in success. But! Success in what? This is where the clarity of martial arts is hard to transfer to the fullness of real life. Even if we have one goal, at which we want to succeed as soon as possible, effectiveness often takes the form of alternating learning and attempting until finally doing is in reach.

To explode the complexity even further, we have many goals, and some of them are much less measurable than others! Extending from recent explorations of clarity and truth, I'll claim that our embodied sense of rightness/yes-ness/do-it contains a fraction of our goals that are unknown to our thinky conscious awareness.

Indirectness is not the difficulty in training clarity toward effectiveness, in my opinion. To grab an example from my day, "invest time in making the IS website more effective" is several steps away (at minimum) from the outcomes I care about, but my body can still connect with the felt sense of how it serves my aims.

Abstraction is part of the difficulty, I believe. Abstract goals need to be translated into concrete actions, and it's often hard to find the right "hell yeah" next step.

However, flinching away from being true with myself — from being honest by welcoming all the signals arising in my body — that flinch is IMHO what the martial arts masters are pointing at. This brings me back to one of my favorite quotes:

"A lot of visible problems that you can't seem to solve are secretly solutions you don't want to admit to adopting to problems you don't want to admit to having."
— David MacIver

Cutting through our delusions, then, with the sword of truth, is the application of the samurai-themed quote that started this off above. (And yes Ryan, I notice this post is re-deriving Navigating by Appetite.) In trying to "be more true", there is a useful sense of "cutting" effectiveness that can be applied to cutting through the invisible barriers we unconsciously raise in protection of our hidden goals, which stymie the outcomes we really want.

It's like the famous writing advice, asking the author, "What do you really want to say with this part?" and upon hearing their live response, "Well, say that then." The "cutting" comes in welcoming and digesting the "but I can't just say that!" reasons we can glimpse in that moment. You (and I) could "say that", do the thing, navigate the fear, use the force — if we can trust in the love inherent in the truth, and inhabit that faith. The kindness of the truth can feel like peeling dragon skin, which stings but is so much better than the false alternatives.

Cheer,
James