無 / 有 – Sungwon Peter Choe Online

Defined By Limitations

Two Faces

God has two faces. Emptiness (無, 무 in Korean or wu in Mandarin) and form (有, 유 in Korean or you in Mandarin). Emptiness is no color, no sound, no taste, no smell. It is instead infinite possibility. But it is also without relationship, without experience. God can only be in relationship with itself through you and I, the experiencer, confined and defined by the limits of our manifest form.

It is only because we are limited, with boundaries marked off by skin and edges of compassion, that we can engage one another in relationship.

Making Love

What is the difference between fucking, having sex and making love (correlating respectively to Deida’s 1st, 2nd and 3rd stage man/woman)? When you fuck, you are doing something to someone. You are the subject. Your partner is the object. You are fully engaged in your own experience.

When you have sex, you are interested not only in your experience but also in your partner’s experience. Is she also experiencing pleasure? You can relate to her. You are in relationship.

When you make love, your sense of self begins to fade away. Yes, you are experiencing pleasure. Yes, so is the one in your embrace, but you are in the movement from relationship to becoming one, to love. “God is love.” But God can only experience love through that movement from relationship to one. 

Don’t get me wrong, though, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with fucking or just having sex. In fact, you may move through all 3 states in one encounter (though in my experience making love is very rare and profoundly beautiful).

God Mode and Wimp Mode

Limitations allow us, then, experience, relationship and love. And challenge, the spice of life, if you will. Seriously, how fun would a video game be that only had a “God mode” (aptly named) be? Not very. Nor is the polar opposite of “God mode”; let’s call it wimp mode. That is, never accepting the challenges of your limitations, but staying comfortably within their boundaries, your spirit withering away.

Staying within your limitations narrows the definition of who you are, both how you are perceived by others and how you understand yourself.

Ken Wilber has mentioned that development in terms of levels of consciousness generally levels off at around the early 20s and then stays constant until around one’s 60s (the only known effective method of moving up in levels of consciousness is meditation, by the way). Note that these are your prime working years. The turbulent challenges of childhood and adolescence have been largely overcome and you become largely defined by your daily routines and the role your profession lends you (”This is Sungwon. He’s a PhD student at KAIST”). Then you hit retirement and you began to question again, who you are and what it’s really all about. Facing the ultimate limiting factor of death probably doesn’t hurt moving the reflective process along, either.

Compassion

In seduction and other self-development communities, there’s a lot of talk of self-limiting beliefs and pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. It’s true, your beliefs limit you and your limitations define who you are. The near-infinite amount of stimulus and information present in any given moment is filtered through your beliefs before it reaches your conscious mind. You literally cannot perceive anything outside of your belief systems. Conversely, everything that you do perceive is done so in terms of your belief systems. So what happens when you accept the challenge of your limits and start expanding their boundaries, pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone? You are able to perceive and understand more of the available universe. Simply put, you become more compassionate. 

Why do you become more compassionate? When you push beyond your limits, you literally expand the definition of who you are, what you identify with. You move from being in relationship to a certain sliver of the universe, to becoming one with it. This is love.

Limits Without End

Limitations, however, are limitless. There is no end. Many people have expectations of happiness based on reaching certain goals. When I’m rich, I’ll be happy. But then you’re not. Popular culture largely blames this on money itself, but there’s nothing wrong with money (while having money is no guarantee of happiness, not having any is generally a prescription for suffering).

Unhappiness in this case stems rather from the fact that making money is no longer a challenge, and that you may have let other dimensions of who you are atrophy. There’s nothing wrong with doing what you’re good at, in fact you should let yourself be an expression of that brilliance, but I encourage you to put some time and effort into areas that you have neglected. 

Push beyond yourself and embrace the world around you.

The Virtues of Immodesty

Learning to take a compliment

I live in Korea. Invariably, whenever you get into a friendly conversation with a Korean, they will compliment you one way or another.

“Your Korean is really good!” 

“You look like Jonny Depp!”

“You’ve got such a small head! It’s this big!” 

The last said while protruding a clenched fist resembling a gesture that would be extremely offensive in some European countries, I imagine. (And yes, saying the size of someone’s head is diminutive is a compliment.)

I used to respond with modesty as good manners, American or Confucian, dictate. 

“Oh, it’s not that good.”

“No, it’s just my dreadlocks.”

“Oh, well, I’ve always thought large heads were cool!”

But there’s nothing wrong in taking a compliment. In fact, I’ve always felt somewhat uncomfortable with answering modestly, as if there was something embarrassing and dishonest about it.

“Thank you”, however, is simple and beautiful. It’s honest and direct. It implicitly shows that you’re capable of making a real connection with someone right away rather than tip-toeing around protocol.

Loving commitment

Now suppose someone found out that I was in a band. They’d ask me what instrument I played and I’d qualify it with “…but I’m not that good.” Same with martial arts. “Yeah, I do this really amazing martial art called Gicheonmun as well as Haedonggumdo, which is based on Gicheon, but I’m not that good.”

Automatic responses are one of the banes of self-development and living consciously. Being modest when not necessary is a special strain of automatic response that directly shapes your identity negatively.

“…but I’m not that good.” 

This mantra of modesty becomes your reality. You portray yourself as mediocre to others and that becomes your identity without and within. 

What happens when you own up to your interests? When you publicly declare your love for your passions?

“Oh, you’re in a band. What instrument do you play?”

“Bass. I’m a bassist”.

Yeah. Rock that. \m/

You begin to identify with your passions. I don’t just play bass. I’m a bassist. I don’t just have a black belt in Haedonggumdo, I’m a martial artist. Of course, I really need to practice bass more if I want to play at the level of my bandmates. Of course, I really need to polish my sword forms to live up to the black belt I’m entitled to wear. But simply identifying myself with these pursuits states my enduring commitment to them. 

That’s right, I love music!!! I love training my body to flow!!! (here used as David Deida does, see Function, Flow and Glow) There is no need to be secretive with these loves. They are not jealous and our love grows stronger in the sharing. 

Once you’ve identified with your loves, you begin to learn to fully engage with them. When I practice, I am engaged in practice, not in thoughts of deliciously greasy thin crust pizza or the inviting soft curves of a woman’s body. When I train, I am engaged in training, not in the subtleties of the presentation I have to give tomorrow or if I will have enough money this month to make my investing goals.

Embrace.

Identify.

Love.

I’m alive when my passions scream.

Modesty be damned.