Double Dose

It's funny how philosophy can drip back into your life at odd times. Twice today, while waiting for PDFs to print at lower resolution (the glamorous part of my job--let me tell you!), I've been halted to ponder my spiritual path. The first occured while reading Promethean: The Created, the newest game from White Wolf Publishing--where I had my internship before I got hired on at DriveThruComics.com. It's basically a roleplaying game where you play a "Frankenstein's monster"--waking up as a fully grown "Promethean" having been made by another Promethean. The end goal of your character is to attain humanity through a long pilgrimage. Like Frankenstein's monster, your character is ultimately rejected by humans who instinctively realize that you aren't one of them....ANYWAYS, there's a passage describing one of the philosophies that characters can adopt--called the refinement of Gold or Aurum:

The soul is a riddle that drives the Aurum. What the soul is has confounded human philosophers for centuries, so the Promethean who takes up the Refinement of Gold doesn't expect to actually find the answer. (If she does at first, she loses this rather grandiose goal in short order.) According to some philosophies, a soul isn't a birthright, it must be attained through devotion, prayer, obedience or other spiritual practices. According to others, humans are born with a soul that they can then cherish or corrupt as they see fit. It's not hard to guess which of these mindsets the Aurum prefer.

Interesting stuff--I hadn't really thought of the "soul" in that regard. I've always adopted the other philosophy mentioned there. Either one is a good argument for "Right" behavior and seem equally compelling.

Then I read an article on Jet Li's Fearless, supposedly his last action film--which is a tragedy in and of itself. The below is an excerpt from the interview, which I found surprising.

"Fearless," Li said, perfectly fits his vision of wushu as more than just self-defense but a path to self-discipline and spiritual peace.

Herein lies the central dichotomy: the Chinese characters for wushu are Zhi (meaning "stop" or "do not") and Ge (meaning "fight" or "war"). Together, Li said, they translate to "stop fighting."

It's a contradiction that's weighed on Li, whose Hollywood films (among them "Romeo Must Die," "The One" and "Unleashed") have been more spectacle that spiritual.

"The message was only how to kick ass, to learn some special move to kill the bad guy," Li said. "But something was missing. [Wushu] is also about how to control yourself, how to become a nice person."

He adds: "Making movies is not my life; it's part of my life."

It's a distinction that was thrown into sharp relief when he and his family were caught in the 2004 tsunami while vacationing in South Asia.

On a trip to the pool with his two small daughters, Li noticed people running toward his hotel, so he started running too. Within a few steps, waves hit his hips, then his chest.

"Then it was too late, the water makes you float," Li said.

When he turned back, "Everything was gone," he said. "The trees were gone, the swimming pool was covered by the ocean. I was standing in the ocean. I looked back, nobody was there."

After a couple more steps, water hit his mouth. His nanny, holding his youngest daughter, started to struggle and the current pulled them out to the ocean.

"He tried to hold the baby, but the water took them out. I couldn't hold them anymore," Li said. "I started yelling . . . "

Hotel employees rushed to help them and brought everyone back inside, above the first floor.

"You're not very afraid at that moment. That was the first wave. But two hours later, the second one came. You think, `I'll die, OK.' But my little girls, my wife . . . that's scary," Li remembered.

That night, Li couldn't sleep at all, so he meditated.

"If God wanted me gone, the water would be here," he said, raising his hand above his forehead. "I couldn't save myself, I couldn't save my daughter, I couldn't swim--but I still have life. What can I do?"

The answer, Li decided, would be to ramp up charity work for his One Foundation (www.one-foundation.com) and to infuse his work with his Buddhist worldview.

"This is the perfect story to match my philosophy," Li says, referencing "Fearless."

The subject of the movie, Huo, turned martial arts into a sport, promoted it as a spiritual discipline and took on all challengers to defend China's martial honor in a series of high-profile exhibition fights against foreigners.

I was going to write about what he must've gone through during those seconds of sheer terror as he saw his daughter being taken out to sea while he was surrounded by one of the most viceral scenes of devastation that humanity can witness. I was going to write about how helpless he must have felt---an athlete at the top of his profession who couldn't swim nor save his family. Instead I'll say that it made me feel great admiration for him--that he is able to face that tragedy with an open mind thanks to years of mental discipline. It is his ability to address and then survive the aftermath of such a thing that makes him fearless and not foolhardy.