Geoff Thompson: Writer – Teacher – Martial artist

Did you ever watch an interview with an obese government official talking about the health and fitness of our nation and think ‘but you’re six stone overweight?’
Or did you ever make question marks with your eye-brows when a highly intelligent, fiscally successful politician talked on TV about the need for honesty and trust in government only weeks after finishing a prison term for corruption?

Or better still have you ever been astounded when spiritual behemoths (in the higher echelons of the church) are convicted in a court of law for paedophilia, while their seniors desperately try to cover up and lie to save papal embarrassment?

I think we have all experienced these anomalies.

The issue of people who are highly developed in one area and almost foetal in another has always massively intrigued me.  The fact that you could have a man or a woman that is five stone overweight working as a school teacher or a headmaster or a doctor or politician is very puzzling. They understand enough about policy to be in office, looking after the welfare of perhaps thousands of people, yet they cannot look after the welfare of their own body.
The poet Rumi called this ‘a mouse pretending to lead a camel.’

Intellectually they are highly developed, but physically and psychologically they are still in embryo.

Similarly I know many people who are absolute artisans when it comes to physical culture but are intellectual and spiritual dwarfs.  I know many world class martial artists who have no idea about finance and economics and many of them, believe it or not, have no spiritual development at all and hold onto their students like jealous husbands.

What I realised very early on in my own development was that if I was to become a free man I had to develop myself in all areas, starting with the very basic physical. This was my base camp. Then I delved into the psychological, physiological, biological, intellectual and from there I explored truth and how truth was malleable and how information could change truth, how experience could change truth, how perception could change truth, and even how culture changed truth. After studying my own layers from the surface to the core I studied the ethical, the moral, the financial, the cultural and the environmental, I looked at class and cast, I took my bones to other areas of the world and then started to look outside the house. I realised that, as Alfred North Whitehead said, truth does not only have ‘simple location’ but that more Beauty, Truth and Goodness are revealed to me as my ability to see becomes deepened through the rigours of practice.

Working on all these areas helped me to find my place spiritually.  For me the real ethereal treasures did not come until I had first exhausted the extremes of my corporeal body. I did this through very serious martial arts training. I went heavily into all-out knock-out or submission fighting. This involved working heavily and at a high level in Judo, wrestling, boxing, karate, Chinese gung fu, Thai boxing and any other system that stretched me physically and psychologically. I even spent a decade working as a nightclub bouncer to stretch the limits of my self and dissolve my fear-blocks.

I found a higher consciousness though very hard contact.

When you push yourself to your physical and psychological limits it is hard not to bump into God.  In fact I would say that mastering of the corporeal develops you into a strong conduit for God. Gurdjieff discovered something similar, he found that we could not access what God had in store for us until we had first prepared ourselves through “conscious labour and deliberate suffering.” My conscious labour was exhaustive physical conditioning. My deliberate suffering was mastering the senses via control of the palate. Ghandi believed that if you mastered palate all the other senses fell into line, and once you mastered the senses you literally controlled the world.

I have cross referenced this with my own intuition and my own experience and found it to be true.

Being a life long advocate of the martial arts I see things in very pragmatic terms, I always aim to get to the very top of what ever class I am in, and when I get there ( and I always get there eventually) I then place myself at the bottom of someone else’s class.

If you are not at the bottom of someone’s class how are you not going to grow?

I went inside myself and struck gold.

I realised that all the real bounty came when I marinated in anabolic discomfort, when I stopped seeing red lights as stop lights and saw them instead as indications to ‘go.’ I became an alchemist and started to turn my discomfort, my pain, my fear, my jealousy, my envy, my greed, my lust, my joy, my happiness – all of my very strong emotions -  into gold. I recognised that they were all the same at their core, they all came from the same place, in the centre they were all just energy looking to find form,  all I had to do was learn to handle this energy and craft it into the shapes that pleased me most, and hopefully help others to do likewise.

The benefit of this kind of practice is that there is no room for spiritual bypassing! I find that people want to access the great before they have mastered the ordinary, which would be like being dropped on the peak of Everest without any acclimatisation. It would kill you. So for me, all things come through the physical, this route acts as a base camp from which I was able to access all the different levels until I found peak-freedom.

Of course I married the heavy physical training with voracious reading, and – like the physical – I pyramided the level of books I read, starting with the easy to read, easy to find volumes that spoke in a basic language, books that inspired me to delve deeper, moving onto the more challenging reads, books that sometimes shattered my world view and challenged my sense of ‘I’.

But what was shattered I re-built, like the phoenix rising from its own ashes.

And any challenge to my sense of ‘I’ only told me that I had not yet found my sense of ‘I’ because I don’t think that can be challenged.

My life thus far has been one of much colour, I have (as the Irish say) been around a few corners, and all of my learning has taught how little I really know – and the realisation of knowing that there is too much to know is to know everything.

What I do know now for sure is that I never want to be a novice calling my self master. I have no intention of becoming a fat life coach, an incongruent politician or a religious hypocrite. And although I am certainly not a master yet, I definitely am not pretending, and certainly I am no mouse.