Lovers of Sophia

by Jason Reza Jorjani

that was made to dissolve together with all of the people (Shawn’s

  potential children, for example) who would have lived it out. Here’s

  the haunting narrative that Agatha delivers in this séance of sorts:

  There is so much love in this house… Dr. Hineman once said

  the dead don’t die, they look on and help. Remember that, John.

  …Shawn. He’s on the beach now. Toe in the water. He’s asking

  you to come in with him. He’s been racing his mother up and

  down the sand. There’s so much love in this house. He’s ten years

  old. He’s surrounded by animals. He wants to be a Vet. You keep

  a rabbit for him, a bird, a fox. He’s in high school. He likes to

  run, like his father. He runs the two mile and the long relay.

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  He’s twenty three. He’s at a university. He makes love to a pretty

  girl named Claire. He asks her to be his wife. He cal s here and

  tel s Lara, who cries. He still runs. Across the university and the

  stadium, where John watches. Oh god, he’s running so fast. Just

  like his daddy. He sees his daddy. He wants to run to him. But

  he’s only six years old and he can’t do it, and the other man is so

  fast. There was so much love in this house.

  This is brilliant writing. The way that Shawn running in the

  university stadium becomes the six year old boy trying to run back

  to his father and away from the kidnapper. The way that Agatha’s

  “There is so much love in this house” turns into “There was so much

  love in this house.” She is able to sense the ruins of a life that could have taken place largely in this house, a family life full of love that was aborted. Traces are left, though. Shades.

  The film is posing a compelling yet controversial thesis: for

  us to be free agents to any degree at al , for us to be individuals

  ethical y responsible for our chosen actions, there cannot be any

  Almighty God. An Almighty God would be even more all knowing

  or omniscient than the precogs were made to seem by the lie

  that Hineman and Burgess perpetrated when they concealed the

  minority reports. Any god [lowercase “g”] whose existence would

  be metaphysical y compatible with our having a chance to make

  meaningful choices in life has to be a finite god, without much more

  precognitive power than Agatha, Art, and Dasch. The same would

  hold for any other gods or angels in the service of this most powerful god.

  Metaphysical liberty cannot be God-given. The very fact of an

  omniscient God’s existence translates into the proposition that all

  possible futures are already known, which means they already exist,

  which means that we do not now choose to make them come into

  being. The idea of God is immoral. We have to choose between

  God and ethics. This is the most profound implication of Minority

  Report, which anticipates the dawn of a new age wherein the barrier between Science and Religion has been demolished. It will be an

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  age wherein Science is no longer materialistic, mechanistic, and

  reductionist, and wherein Religion has done away with the unethical

  idea of God Almighty and has been reconstructed from out of the

  precondition of all ethical life: the fundamental faith in our chance

  to make a better future.

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  NOTES ON THE TAO OF BRUCE LEE

  Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, California on 27

  November 1940, year of the Dragon. He was raised in the

  thoroughly Westernized British colony of Hong Kong

  where he at attended English schools until the age of 18,

  when he returned to the United States for higher education. During

  his teenage years in Hong Kong Lee had received training in boxing,

  which was widely available on account of the British culture of the

  colony. He could easily have become a lightweight class boxing

  world champion. Lee also learned the Western art of fencing from

  his older brother, who was a fencing champion. Lee, already a boxer,

  had gotten into numerous street fights with his peers at school, and

  it is on this account that he sought training in Asian martial arts.

  His mother was of half-German ancestry, so the top teachers

  in Hong Kong refused to teach him, since he was not a full-breed

  Chinese and they were against teaching martial arts techniques to

  non-Asians. He had to train privately with the one willing teacher

  that he did find, since Yip Man’s fellow students refused to train with him. When Lee, now empowered with martial arts skil s, beat up a

  boy who turned out to have been the son of a Hong Kong organized

  crime don, his parents decided he should return to the United

  States. After a brief stay in his birthplace of San Francisco, he moved to Seattle and studied Drama, Western Philosophy, and Psychology

  at the University of Washington.

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  Lee then returned to the San Francisco Bay Area and opened a

  school in Oakland, where he fought for the right to teach Caucasians,

  frowned upon in Chinatown at the time. He was concerned with

  equality of all people regardless of race. According to his wife Linda, Lee viewed himself “as a citizen of the world.” In 1967, all of the sifu from Chinatown had collectively signed a paper threatening him.

  He was challenged to a fight, which he won decisively. However,

  this fight also afforded him a flash of insight that drew together the eclectic influences he had absorbed throughout his life. When he

  was starting up as a martial arts teacher in Oakland, out of necessity, he worked with teachers from several Asian traditions other than the

  Wing Chun style of Kung Fu in which he had been predominately

  trained. These included Judo, Karate, and Taekwondo. Lee decided

  that his own Wing Chun style and for that matter, al established

  Martial Arts traditions were too rigid to be effective under the chaotic real-world conditions of a street fight. He devoted himself to devising a more scientific approach to unarmed combat.

  Lee studied Newtonian physics, examining how its principles

  relate to the techniques of European fencing and Western boxing

  that he learned during his youth in Hong Kong. With a total

  disrespect for traditional formality and guided solely by the criteria of practicality, flexibility, speed, and efficiency, Lee worked to merge the strongest elements of diverse Asian martial arts traditions

  together with Western techniques. The latter not only included

  boxing and fencing, but also an exercise regiment of weight training

  for strength, running for endurance, and stretching for flexibility.

  Lee called this “style of no style” Jeet Kune Do or “The Way of the Intercepting Strike”, and adopted “Using no way as way; having no

  limitation as limitation” as its motto. These phrases were emblazoned

  in Chinese calligraphy around the Taiju, together with arrows

  depicting the constant flow back and forth between yin and yang.

  At first, Lee taught Jeet Kune Do in his schools, but by the

  end of 1969, he grows concerned that his students look to his art

  as containing a secret way of special techniques. So in January of

  1970 at height of popularity in Martial Arts world, he closed all of

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za jorjani

  his schools. As he put it in one of his lines in Longstreet: “I cannot teach you, only help you to explore yourself – nothing more.” He

  decided to privately train only a handful of students, getting to know each student well enough to help him free himself from his own

  psychological limitations. The Sportsweek in the Washington Star printed in Washington DC on August 16, 1970 captures the essence

  of this period in Lee’s career:

  Three of Bruce Lee’s pupils, Joe Lewis, Chuck Norris and Mike

  Stone, have between them won every major karate tournament

  in the United States at least once. Lewis was Grand National

  champion three successive years. Lee handles and instructs these

  guys almost as a parent would a young child. It’s like walking

  into a saloon in the old west and seeing the fastest guy in the

  territory standing there with notches all over his gun. Then in

  walks a pleasant little fellow who says: “How many times do I

  have to tell you, you’re doing it all wrong.” And the other guy

  listens, intently.

  They were listening intently for a reason. Lee’s ‘physical’ ability was nearly paranormal. He routinely performed one-finger pushups, on

  one hand. He could sit elevated in a jackknife position for longer

  than a half hour, while watching television. He could send opponents

  flying several feet back from a punch delivered from only 1 inch

  away. Lee’s sidekicks made recipients feel as if a car had hit them.

  On one occasion, he was able to strike a formidable Karate master

  opponent 16 times in a fight that lasted only 11 seconds. The fight

  ended with Lee knocking him the full length of a handball court. He

  was pushing the body to its limits and he final y found them when

  he strained his fourth sacral nerve in his back. Although he would

  defy the expectations of his doctors and rehabilitate himself to being an even better martial artist than he was before the incident, Lee was nonetheless bedridden for six months. He decided to channel his

  pent up physical energy mental y, by researching the many volumes

  on martial arts, philosophy, and motivational psychology that he

  had collected in his extensive library. He read and reread Buddha,

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  Alan Watts, Karl Rogers, Lao Tzu, Friedrich Pearls, D.T. Suzuki,

  and Jiddu Krishnamurti. In dialogue with these thinkers, above all

  Krishnamurti, the bedridden Bruce Lee filled seven notebooks with

  The Tao of Jeet Kune Do.

  In this magnum opus, Lee criticizes traditional martial arts forms

  as “thousands of years of propaganda.” Someone bound within the

  systems of karate, judo, or kung-fu, is incapable of even accurately

  perceiving the combat actions of a street fight, let alone effectively taking part in one. The training of such a “classical man” consists

  only of simulated combat, wherein flowery forms and artificial techniques are rehearsed ritualistical y. Faced with an immediate

  threat to one’s life, it is absurdly impractical to make sure that one is adhering to proper method. Lee demands that students of martial

  art forget winning or losing, and be prepared to sustain an injury

  and even death in the course of their training. Lee saw it as a farce

  that judges at martial arts tournaments awarded points for blows

  that never touched an opponent, based on who would probably

  have hurt the others. He referred to these rehearsals as “organized

  despair” and “dryland swimming”. Lee was the first martial artist

  to have taught his student through full contact sparring, borrowing

  boxing gloves and headgear from Western sports. At the 1967

  International Karate Championships at Long Beach, where he was

  first noticed by Hol ywood, Lee introduced this into what were

  hitherto non-contact martial arts tournaments.

  Only in the face of real danger will the martial artist recognize

  that practicality is the ultimate criterion. This does not mean an

  “anything goes” recklessness, but the ability to adopt any tool that

  functions in the simplest and most direct manner to attain one’s

  objective in a given combat situation. For example, in order to

  respond to an opponent’s attack immediately, one must be able to

  strike from wherever one is, without repositioning. Hooking and

  swinging techniques from boxing can be useful y adopted by the

  martial artist to this end. Lee colorful y refers to these unassuming

  attacking tactics as “the un-crispy stuff”.

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  Patterns of rhythmical classical blocks – such as katas of karate –

  are not suited to the broken rhythm of a street fight. It is not simply that they are not physical y versatile enough. Stereotyped technique psychological y mediates one’s relationship to one’s opponent, thereby interfering with a direct perception of the combat situation

  and precluding an immediate response. Consequently, a process of

  un-conditioning the mind is required in order to replace a “this is

  the only way” attitude with what Lee cal s “choiceless awareness”.

  According to Lee, “awareness has no frontier” whereas “all thought

  is partial.” Systems are established out of fear of uncertainty. So

  as to be secured against being disturbed by the unexpected, one’s

  relationship to others is fixed within a pattern of conduct. These

  patterns are sustained by thought, which is a mechanical process

  whereby memory frames every new experience in terms of old

  habits and prejudices. It is here that Krishnamurti’s influence is

  most apparent.

  Jiddu Krishnamurti, although born and raised in India (another

  British colony), took an irreverently Western approach to Eastern

  spirituality. He was an iconoclast who resisted attempts by the

  Theosophical Society to turn him into an Eastern Messiah. He

  advocated individual authenticity and open-minded, dynamic

  creativity against what he saw as the backward fascination of certain

  Westerners with the guru-worship and obscurantist ritualism that

  held Indian society in a spiritual straight jacket. Krishnamurti

  taught that outward revolution aimed at a sane world society

  beyond intercultural warfare was only attainable through freeing

  the mind from all cultural conditioning, by cultivating an intense

  awareness wherein Thought’s conceptualizing function becomes

  transparent to itself. Krishnamurti’s ‘method’ for this involved the

  aporia of Socratic dialogue. He referenced Socrates repeatedly and had mocking contempt for Eastern sitting meditation.

  Agreeing with Krishnamurti, Lee explains that there is a

  different kind of knowing than the piecemeal knowledge afforded by the thinking intellect. It is clear that Lee does not mean a mere

  regress to animal instinct, since cultivating such ‘intuition’ also

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  means “to destroy your own impulses caused by the instincts of

  self-preservation”. We see this juxtaposition of a call to retrieve

  something like animal instinct together with a transcendent teaching

  of reconciliation with death, in this famous scene from Longstreet where Bruce Lee (L) has his student (S) on the ground in a choke

  hold, and the following exchange ensues
. It centers on the Taoist

  imagery of water as a metaphor for the yielding, dynamic strength

  of the formless:

  L: What is your instinct?

  S: To pray.

  L: In this position, your arms are useless.

  S: Yeah. (coughing)

  L: Can you kick or stomp me?

  S: (coughing) No.

  L: Then, if you wish to survive, what do you do?

  S: I don’t know.

  L: Bite.

  S: Bite?!

  L: Are we not animals?

  (Lee releases him, checks if he’s ok.)

  S: Bite, huh?

  L: Biting is efficient in close quarters. But don’t make a plan of

  biting. That is a very good way to lose your teeth.

  S: There is so much to remember.

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  L: If you try to remember you will lose. Empty your mind. Be

  formless. Shapeless. Like water. Now you put water into a cup, it

  becomes the cup. Put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now

  water can flow, or creep, or drip, or crash. Be water, my friend.

  S: Yeah, why don’t I just stand in front of Bull and recite that to

  him, maybe he’ll faint – or drown.

  L: When is it?

  S: Tomorrow.

  L: You are not ready.

  S: I know.

  L: Like everyone else, you want to learn the way to win, but never

  to accept the way to lose. To accept defeat, to learn to die is to be

  liberated from it. So when tomorrow comes you must free your

  ambitious mind, and learn the art of dying.

  Lee cal s for the cultivation of immediate intuition through non-

  judgmental introspective observation, wherein an alert and sharply

  focused consciousness beyond the limits of thought becomes aware

  of the limitations that deliberative thought has placed on oneself. This cannot be done in monastic isolation. It requires an interpersonal

  relationship, which is “a process of self-revelation.” The other is

  “the mirror in which you discover yourself.” Even at an ontological

  level “to be is to be related”. One can only become aware of one’s

  unconscious conditioning by observing one’s reactions in living

  relationship with others, and then subjecting these reactions to “a

  continuous state of inquiry without conclusion” which dissolves the

  judgmental convictions upon which they are based. Of course, Lee