Matrix IV 

This matrix continues with the study of modern martial artists focusing on close-in fighting, grappling and submissions.  The boxing techniques listed include fakes and set-ups to create openings.  The free-spar katas are unique because they include groups of techniques that are effective in free sparring.  By stringing them together in kata format it is easier to remember them.  The advanced judo section is a further development of classic judo throws to include a floating set-up and entrance to the throw with an execution that slows uke's  (the person being thrown) fall.  This could nicknamed soft judo since tori (the thrower) supports uke during the throw greatly softening the fall.  What this does is completely remove the fear of falling for new students.  It also saves on the joints and bodies for the older students.  As the students get more experienced the throws become more aerial still with soft landings.  This is when judo become fun because you can experiment with technique in the middle of the throw and uke always has a soft landing.  This also enables older practitioners to throw and fall well into later years; difficult if not impossible with regular methods.

Finally, we continue with the hard-soft approach by reciting 50 sentences regarding empty mind and consciousness. This is from N. Maharaj's work who was an Indian Mystic.  This is an extension of our mushin (no-mind) practice applying it as a meditation in everyday life.  

Download Matrix IV pdf

View Movie Soft Judo.MPG

View Movie Boxing.MPG

View Movie Pad Work.MPG

Fifty "I-Am" Sayings

The 50 sayings are included below.  These were take from N. Maharaj's lectures many of which are contained in the book "I Am That" by N. Maharaj.  These sentences were chosen from all over based on what struck the author.  There could be thousands of sayings listed here.  They all point to a single truth and express it from many angles similar to the facets of a diamond.  As a class we all memorize the full 50 saying with certain sayings being assigned to particular students by the head instructor.

Set I

1. Focus your mind on 'I am', which is pure and simple being. Be with it all the time you can spare, until you revert to it spontaneously. There is no simpler and easier way.

2.  When the 'I am myself' goes, the 'I am all' comes. When the 'I am all' goes, 'I am' comes. When even 'I am' goes, reality alone is...'I am' is a tiny seed which will grow into a mighty tree – quite naturally, without a trace of effort.

3.  Refuse all thoughts except one: the thought 'I am'. The mind will rebel in the beginning, but with patience and perseverance it will yield and keep quiet. Once you are quiet, things will begin to happen spontaneously and quite naturally, without any interference on your part.

4.  Just keep in mind the feeling 'I am', merge in it, till your mind and feeling become one. By repeated attempts you will stumble on the right balance of attention and affection and your mind will be firmly established in the thought-feeling 'I am'. Whatever you think, say, or do, this sense of immutable and affectionate being remains as the ever-present background of the mind.

5.  I simply followed (my teacher's) instruction which was to focus the mind on pure being 'I am', and stay in it. I used to sit for hours together, with nothing but the 'I am' in my mind and soon peace and joy and a deep all-embracing love became my normal state. In it all disappeared -- Only peace remained and unfathomable silence. 

6.  Don't identify yourself with an idea. Best is the simple feeling 'I am'. Dwell on it patiently. Here patience is wisdom. Never think of failure, there can be no failure in this understanding. Your earnestness will determine the rate of progress.

7.  Stop searching, and see -- it is here and now -- 'I am' is first-hand and needs no proofs. Stay with it.  Give your heart and mind to brooding over the 'I am', what is it, how is it, what is its source, its life, its meaning.   

8.  'I am this, I am that is a dream, while pure 'I am' has the stamp of reality on it. You have tasted so many things which came to naught. Only the sense 'I am' persisted -- unchanged. Stay with the changeless among the changeful, until you are able to go beyond. 

9.  Your very search for happiness makes you miserable Try being indifferent to pain and pleasure giving all your attention to the level on which 'I am' is timelessly present. Soon you will realize that peace and happiness are in your very nature and it is only seeking them through some particular channels, that disturbs.

10.  My Teacher ordered me to attend to the sense 'I am' and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I am', it may look too simple, even crude. Yet it worked!

Set II

 1.  The sense 'I am' is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it -- body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions, etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.

2.  Separate consistently and perseveringly the 'I am' from 'this' or 'that', and try to feel what it means to be, just to be, without being 'this' or 'that'.  The only fact you are sure of is that you are. The 'I am' is certain. The 'I am this' is not.

3.  It is very much like digging a well.You reject all that is not water, till you reach the life-giving spring. The 'I am' that pursues the pleasant and shuns the unpleasant is false; The 'I am' that sees pleasure and pain as inseparable sees rightly.

4.  'I am' is ever afresh. You do not need to remember in order to be. ... At present your being is mixed up with experiencing. All you need is to unravel being from the tangle of experiences. Once you have known pure being, without being this or that, you will discern it among experiences and you will no longer be misled by names and forms.

5.  Struggle to find out what you are in reality. Cling to one thing, that matters, hold on to 'I am' and let go all else. This is your work. There is nothing to hold on to and nothing to forget. Everything is known, nothing is remembered.

6.  Just be content with what you are sure of. And the only thing you can be sure of is 'I am'.  Just remember yourself. 'I am', is enough to heal your mind and take you beyond.  Just have some trust. 

7.  My teacher told me to hold on to the sense 'I am' tenaciously and not to swerve from it even for a moment. I did my best to follow his advice and in a comparatively short time I realized within myself the truth of his teaching.

8.  Delve deeply into the sense 'I am' and you will surely discover that the perceiving centre is universal, as universal as the light that illumines the world. All that happens in the universe happens to you, the silent witness.

9.  Before the mind -- I am. 'I am' is not a thought in the mind; the mind happens to you, You do not happen to the mind. And since time and space are in the mind, I am beyond time and space, eternal and omnipresent.

10.  What do you love now? The 'I am'. Give your heart and mind to it, think of nothing else. This, when effortless and natural, is the highest state. All my spare time I would spend looking at myself in silence. And what a difference it made, and how soon! 

SET III

1.  A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part.

2.  When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing, then the Supreme State will come to you uninvited and unexpected.

3.  There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person.  The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot.

4.  Your first task is to see the sorrow in you and around you; your next, to long intensely for liberation. The very intensity of longing will guide you; you need no other guide.

5.  The only thing a Guru can tell you is my dear sir you are mistaken, you are not what you take yourself to be.

6.  Freedom from all desire is eternity. All attachment implies fear, for all things are transient. And fear makes one a slave. This freedom from attachment does not come with practice; it is natural, when one knows one's true being. Self-knowledge is detachment. All craving is due to a sense of insufficiency. When you know that you lack nothing, that all there is, is you and yours, desire ceases.

7.  Christianity is one way of putting words together and Hinduism is another. The real is, behind and beyond words, incommunicable, directly experienced, explosive in its effect on the mind. It is easily had when nothing else is wanted. The unreal is created by imagination and perpetuated by desire.

8.  Having realized that you cannot influence the results, pay no attention to your desire and fears. Let them come and go. Don't give them the nourishment of interest and attention. The world appears to you so overwhelmingly real because you think of it all the time; cease thinking of it and it will dissolve into thin mist.

9.  Time is endless, though limited, eternity is in the split moment of the now. We miss it because the mind is ever shuttling between the past and the future. It will not stop to focus the now. It can be done with comparative ease, if interest is aroused.

10.  To me nothing ever happens. There is something changeless, motionless, immovable, rock-like, unassailable; a solid mass of pure being-consciousness-bliss. I am never out of it. Nothing can take me out of it, no torture, no calamity.

Set IV

1. Look at yourself steadily - it is enough. The door that locks you in is also the door that lets you out. The "I am" is the door. Stay at it until it opens. As a matter of fact, it is open, only you are not at it. You are waiting at the non-existing painted doors, which will never open.

2.  You need not get at it, you are it. It will get at you, if you give it a chance. Let go your attachment to the unreal and the real will swiftly and smoothly step into its own. Stop imagining yourself being or doing this or that, and the realization that you are the source and heart of all will dawn upon you.

3.  Nothing is done by me, everything just happens. I do not expect, I do not plan, I just watch events happening, knowing them to be unreal. 

4.  In the end you know that there is no sin, no guilt, no retribution, only life in its endless transformations. With the dissolution of the personal "I", personal suffering disappears. What remains is the great sadness of compassion, the horror of the unnecessary pain.

5.  Whatever you think about with desire or fear appears before you as real. Look at it without desire or fear and it does lose substance. Pleasure and pain are momentary. It is simpler and easier to disregard them than to act on them.

6.  First of all, abandon all self-identification, stop thinking of yourself as such-and-such, so-and-so, this or that. Abandon all self-concern, worry not about your welfare, material or spiritual. Abandon any desire, gross or subtle, stop thinking of achievement of any kind. You are complete here and now, you need absolutely nothing.

7.  For some time, the mental habits may linger in spite of the new vision, the habit of longing for the unknown past and fearing the unknown future. When you know these are of the mind only, you can go beyond them.

8.  Having seen that you are a bundle of memories held together by attachment, step out and look from the outside. You may perceive for the first time something which is not memory. You cease to be Mr-so-and-so, busy about his own affairs. You are at last at peace. You realize that nothing was ever wrong with the world, you alone were wrong and now it is all over. Never again will you be caught in the meshes of desire born of ignorance.

9.  With some, realization comes imperceptibly, but somehow they need convincing. They have changed, but they do not notice it. Such non-spectacular cases are often the most reliable.

10.You will recognize that you have returned to your natural state by a complete absence of all desire and fear. After all, at the root of all desire and fear is the feeling of not being what you are. Just as a dislocated joint pains only as long as it is out of shape, and is forgotten as soon as it is set right, so is all self-concern a symptom of mental distortion which disappears as soon as one is in the normal state.

Set V

1. Keep in mind your goal of freedom, until it dawns on you that you are already free, that freedom is not something in the distant future to be earned with painful efforts, but perennially one's own, to be used! Liberation is not an acquisition but a matter of courage, the courage to believe that you are free already and to act on it.

2. Spontaneity became a way of life, the real became natural and the natural became real. And above all, infinite affection, love, dark and quiet, radiating in all directions, embracing all, making all interesting and beautiful, significant and auspicious.

3. Having realized that I am with, and yet beyond the world, I became free from all desire and fear. I did not reason out that I should be free, I found myself free, unexpectedly, without the least effort. This freedom from desire and fear remained with me since then.

4. Another thing I noticed was that I do not need to make an effort; the deed follows the thought, without delay and friction. I have also found that thoughts become self-fullfilling; things would fall in place smoothly and rightly. The main change was in the mind; it became motionless and silent, responding quickly, but not perpetuating the response.

5. All that lives, works for protecting, perpetuating and expanding consciousness. This is the world's sole meaning and purpose. 

6. It [the dream] appears to be beginningless, but in fact it is only now. From moment to moment you are renewing it. Once you have seen that you are dreaming, you shall wake up. But you do not see because you want the dream to continue. A day will come when you will long for the ending of the dream, with all your heart and mind, and be willing to pay the price; the price will be dispassion and detachment, the loss of interest in the dream itself. Wanting it to continue is not inevitable. See clearly your condition, your very clarity will release you.

7. Keep the "I am" in the focus of awareness, remember that you are, watch yourself ceaselessly and the unconscious will flow into the conscious without any special effort on your part. Wrong desires and fears, false ideas, social inhibitions are blocking and preventing its free interplay with the conscious. Once free to mingle, the two become one and the one becomes all.

8. The world is there because I am, but I am not the world. I know there is a world, which includes this body and this mind, but I do not consider them to be more "mine" than other minds and bodies. They are there, in time and space, but I am timeless and spaceless.

9. The world is but the surface of the mind and the mind is infinite. What we call thoughts are just ripples in the mind. When the mind is quiet it reflects reality. When it is motionless through and through, it dissolves and only reality remains.

10. As long as you believe yourself to be a body, you will ascribe causes to everything. I do not say things have no causes. Each thing has innumerable causes. It is as it is, because the world is as it is. Every cause in its ramifications covers the universe. There are no causes, but your ignorance of your real being, which is perfect and beyond causation. For whatever happens, all the universe is responsible and you are the source of the universe.

Download Fifty "I-Am" Sayings.doc

"Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free.  Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing.  This is the ultimate."
Chuang Tzu