Daily Reflection 2.20.21

 Chapter 5 of The Art of War contains some difficult and interesting material. Here is verse 3:

To ensure that your whole host may withstand the brunt of the enemy's attack and remain unshaken -- this is effected by maneuvers direct and indirect. 
 

Our translator devotes a long section to the interpretation of this verse, including commentaries by many later interpreters. The difficulty centers around the two Chinese characters being rendered here as "direct" and "indirect." The character being rendered "direct" is 正, "zheng," which in other contexts can mean "correct" or even "orthodox." Indirect is 奇, "qi," meaning "odd." 

A few of the commentaries will help illustrate the difference: 

Wei Liao Tzu says, "Direct warfare favors frontal attacks, indirect warfare attacks from the rear." Tsao Kung says, "Going straight out to join battle is a direct operation; appearing on the enemy's rear is an indirect maneuver." Li Wei-kung says, "in war, to march straight ahead is 正, turning movements, on the other hand, are 奇."
 

Our translator adds:

To put it perhaps a little more clearly: any attack or other operation is 正, on which the enemy has had his attention fixed; whereas that is 奇, which takes him by surprise or comes from an unexpected quarter. If the enemy perceives a movement which is meant to be 奇, it immediately becomes 正. 
 

I've written before here that the most important battles take place within our own souls, defined, as always, as the sum total of our actions and our mental representations.

Now, it's a commonplace that if you attempt to make a change in your life, you will encounter resistance from two sources. The first is the people in your life who are used to you being the way you are, and don't want you to change. Call these people the Enemy Without. Even friends and family can be the Enemy Without, and not because they don't like you or want to hurt you. It's just that they're used to you being the way you are, and if you change, it means that, in some way, they will have to change. 

It's easy to see how to apply the principle of indirect warfare in such cases: If you have people in your life who don't want you to change, you can avoid them. They don't need to know about what you're doing, they don't need to hear about your plans or your habits, and they definitely don't need to know about what you're hoping to do in the future. If they can't be avoided-- if you live with them, or work with them-- then don't tell them what you're doing. To tell them is to set yourself up for sabotage.

The second and by far the more difficult source of resistance comes not from without, but from within. How many times have you attempted a new habit, only to give up after a few days or weeks-- or, even more commonly, after the first time you miss a single day? In every case, the enemy was within you. And it won.

But the principle of indirect warfare can be applied to the Enemy Within as well as to the Enemy Without. All you have to do is to not tell yourself your intentions.

Let's say you want to get in better shape, and so you've taken up running every day. Then one day something comes up during your usual running time. Maybe you get a phone call from an old friend, or a work emergency comes up, or maybe you just sleep in that day. Either way, you end up not going. Now, for any daily habit, the hardest day to do it is always the day after you don't do it. This is when you'll hear the voice of the Enemy Within saying things to you like, "I already skipped yesterday. What's the point? I'm clearly not a runner." "My 100-day streak is over, so why keep going?" "I guess I don't run every day after all." 

(Incidentally, I think that this is why a lot of people who try to recover from drinking or drug use fail-- they treat any minor relapse as the equivalent of returning to addiction full-time. I knew a girl who was sober from alcohol for a year. Then she got a tooth infection and had to go to the dentist. The dentist prescribed a narcotic for the pain. After filling her prescription she took a pill, and then took a second pill-- thus exceeding the prescribed dose. Having done so, she told herself, "Well, I'm already 'out,' so I might as well get drunk." She did so, and then fell into despondency, in the belief that her one-night bender had undone the work of the entire previous year. In fact, it had not-- she was sober for all the days before she went out, and for all the days after she dried up again. Unfortunately, the culture of most 12-step groups is to focus on accumulating continuous days, months, and years of sobriety, and so treats any relapse as a return to Day 1.) 

Where were we?

Oh yes. Don't tell yourself your plans.

If you find yourself resisting a habit, do it anyway-- but don't tell yourself you're doing it. Tell yourself you're doing something else, and make yourself a deal. If you don't want to go running today, tell yourself you're not going running. You're just putting your shorts and shoes on. And once they're on, hey, you can sit back down and watch TV if you want-- but you're going to do it in running shorts. Most of the time you'll find that once you're dressed for a run, you're ready to go running. But sometimes you're not. In that case, you tell yourself-- Look, Self, I don't feel like this today either, so we're just going to do a quick run around the block. Five minutes around the block-- that's barely a commercial break. We can do that, can't we? 

Do that, and you'll usually find that the resistance crumbles; you've done five minutes, so why not do five miles?

Every now and again, the resistance doesn't crumble. And so you just do five minutes that day. But what will happen in that case is that, the next day, you won't have the same level of resistance. The Inner Enemy won't say "We didn't run yesterday, so why bother today?" Instead, the momentum built up by your five minute run yesterday will propel you to a ten minute run, a twenty or a thirty minute run today.

You can apply this to any habit. 

One of the tricks that you can use is to set a basic minimum. A basic minimum is whatever the smallest amount of practice is necessary to maintain a given habit. It could be that five minute run around the block. In martial arts, it could be a basic kata or form, or a short workout on a heavy bag. In music, it could be working through a scale or a song. 

This is one of the reasons that Banishing Rituals are so useful in magical practice-- on the one hand, they are useful for the obvious purpose of clearing one's aura and physical surroundings of unbalanced energies. But they also function as a minimum. They rarely take more than 5 minutes, and it's very easy to tell yourself, when you find yourself resisting practicing on a given day, "I'm just going to do a banishing ritual." Most of the time, you'll find that you want to keep going after that with your other practices and meditations. On the rare occasions that that doesn't happen, you've still got the effects of the banishing ritual.   

So there you have it. Apply the principles of 正 and 奇 both to the Enemy Without and to the Enemy Within, and find yourself on the path to victory...

Or as the saying has it, "Never tell the Devil your plans."