Musashi urged fighters to “Fight like you are already dead.” He did not mean throw your life away. He did not mean be inert like a corpse. He meant do what you need to do to prevail. Do not allow clinging to your own life to degrade your commitment to victory.
Nowadays many people live in war zones. The zones are spreading and turbulence is increasing, in our environments and in our own hearts. We may need to fight to keep ourselves alive or to protect people who are depending on us. We may need to create peace, in our worlds and in our own hearts. Each of us will have the opportunity to do both. It will be up to each of us to get it right.
There are many who, unlike Musashi, think of death as an abstraction, as something for others. There are some who think that after death they turn to nothing, or that after death they enter eternity. But we do not have to guess. We do not have to depend on sources handed down. We have access to experience, to facts we can use to orient, decide, and act wisely. We can know what to do and how to live.
One of those facts is that we are standing in eternity, right now. We always are, and there is no way that we or anyone else can be anywhere else. Some things can seem like eternity, like waiting in line at the DMV, being stuck on the interstate when you are already late, waiting in the emergency room with a family member who is sick. Using the word eternity as a descriptor for these experiences, as we do, drains the word of its power to point to its real referent.
Right now we feel or remember or expect a torrent of events, joys, threats, consummations, regrets, obstructions, uncertainties, desires, dreams and dreads, which follow one another through our minds, with no recovery time. The flood goes on. In it we feel far from eternity, forced into the confines of the immediate, as we feel impelled to break out of the confines of the immediate, to get to the future, to examine the past, to go.
That agitation prevents us from seeing where we stand. Blocks our vision and our path. That agitation is made of arcs of desire. Bridges, like electrical arcs, some strong, some weak, all ephemeral, always changing but always present on our path through life, like stories from long ago, connecting us to what we want, connecting us to what we can’t stand, and, in all the places where arcs do not form, screening off things that seem irrelevant but which in fact constitute our world, count, can be valuable, and which, because they stand outside our arcs of desire, we cannot notice, understand, or use.
Because we are contemplating a world that appears to us to be composed of our own arcs of desire, we do not notice most of what is there, what is here. We do not see that we stand in eternity, right now. Because of the condition of our minds our lives are confined. That may seem a strange observation, but it is good news. It means we can train our minds and open our eyes. It means we can live our lives in the presence of eternity. It means that we can live our own lives after all.
Then when it comes time to fight or to make peace, to live or to die, we are free to do what is wise and right and good, without throwing our lives away or clinging to them.
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Post copyright © 2025 Jeffrey Brooks, MountainKarateNC.com, Yamabayashi Ryu, Mountain Karate Dojo, in the mountains of western NC.
Photo by 1millikarat via Unsplash
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True Karate Dō by Jeffrey Brooks
“One of the best books I’ve read in years, inviting and compelling. Jeff Brooks moves effortlessly from martial arts to Buddhism to consciousness studies, self-transformation, and related fields in this wide-ranging and Illuminating study that has much to offer both novice explorers and veteran practitioners. A splendid achievement.”— Philip Zaleski, Editor, The Best Spiritual Writing series