ZEN FOCUS: The Art of Being One with Your Target

"He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior." —Confucius

By Nahu

Uncertainty rules our lives and creeps into every effort toward personal achievement. If we had the ability to see our future, would we have changed what we were doing in the past? On the other hand, if we had the ability to affect our future what kind of chaos might our interferences create? Is there an intelligent solution to this riddle of achieving our goals without drastically meddling with the outcome? In the movie, The Butterfly Effect, the effort to change events in the future only led to further complications that continued to obfuscate the goal and increase the probability of failing in the future for its unfortunate characters. The fact remains, any effort to reach a goal originates with a desire to forecast our future and fulfill it through action. It's like shooting an arrow through chaos of probabilities and hoping to hit a target we can't really see.

For example, many people might simply imagine life as a continuous effort to succeed in reaching specific goals somewhere in an imaginative future far beyond the confines of the present. One might ask, if the essence of a satisfying life is the end result of successfully reaching one's goals, what can we do to increase our efficiency to reach these goals without negatively interfering with the outcome?

Surprisingly, there is something you can do that will immediately bring your target much closer. To unite the space/time factors that stand between your intentions and those far off goals requires the reduction of hidden barriers. Hidden mental barriers comprise the mental/emotional programs that are running all the time in the background of our efforts. These are the whispering voices of your doubts, fears and anxieties hat are the offspring of difficulties encountered in the past.

The Zen of Archery is a study in the kind of self-mastery that leads to efficient planning. It teaches the young student, desiring to successfully reach their target, a philosophy that presents a solution through meditation and archery practice that many in the western world might find quite perplexing. The following story can help clarify the essence of a Zen solution to the problem.

A German professor seeking to perfect his archery upon reading about Zen said he couldn't believe that meditation could improve his skills. Later, he went to Japan to study for three years to become a master archer. The essence of his master's teachings taught him that hitting the target is not the point—one must be first grounded, because the target is within. Grounding one's energies requires feeling connected to the navel, symbolic of the early union with our mother and the earth, enlisting the principle of gravitation to aid the flight of the arrow toward its target.

For the intellectual academic this concept was very foreign and he worried about it day and night. Try as he might, though he hit his target time after time, he failed in the eyes of his master. Finally he just gave up. With that decision in mind, he came back the next day to say goodbye to his master. While quietly observing the master teach a new disciple, he suddenly saw the point, it came in a flash. Grounded in his union with the universe, the master had let go of the effort to shoot the target. When the mind stops functioning, time stops and it seems as if the arrow shoots itself. At that point the student got up, shot the arrow and it went through dead center. He had learned the art of grounding, 'effortless effort.' Thus he became certified as a master archer.

The meaning of the story, of course, is that when we let go fully of all the worry to achieve our goals we seem to reach them in an effortless manner. When we practice in this way we eliminate many of the barriers which separate us from our goals. Another psychological aspect is that the student must first eliminate as much of the inhibiting internal dialogue as possible that is coming from old programming.

I had to strive to turn off lots of negative programming. For instance, as a little boy, I grew up in many foster homes. Because of the constant instability of home life and abusive parents, I accumulated many problems with issues over trusting. It is not surprising that the motivation in my quest to become a sensitive counselor fulfilled my earlier lack of loving communication in my childhood. Thus, the goal to become a holistic teacher, like mastering Zen focus and becoming one with my target (goals), arose from a need rooted deep in my subconscious and the primal yearning for a holistic connection with the universe. Think of how much more efficient my quest would have been if I first sought to know my inner self.

Clearly expressed, knowing or understanding our selves reduces the uncertainty that interferes with the purity of focus necessary to accurately reach our target without repetitive failures. Now I understand more clearly why I failed to achieve so many of my goals, i.e., there was too much "uncertainty" dialogue within me that obscured my focus.

In Zen archery reducing uncertainty is achieved through eliminating thoughts that divert concentration and eliminate the sense of Oneness with the target. Thus, by reducing mental diversions, one can release the arrow with one quick, sure movement that unerringly unites a centered mind and the target in one wholistic union. That is why Zen also employs the use of a Koan or a nonsensical riddle to move beyond mental/emotional obstructions. The Koan, which cannot be successfully answered with rational thought, breaks the mental back of the intellect's tendency to undermine the spiritual union of the student and the target.

However, it is with the "full mind" (as differentiated from the partial mind) that D. T. Suzuki warns us to make wise use of our mental resources or intent:

"To stop the mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means your mind persuades your whole body. With your full mind you form the mudra in your hands."
           —D. T. Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Chapter on Non-Dualism.

It is not altogether the effort of using your mind, but how you use it (focus it) that makes the difference. The question is, are we using our mind in a holistic sense, or as an intellectual instrument that constantly interferes with the target? In that sense its use can be nothing short of useless dialogue running in the background. This means it is important to empty oneself of the tendency to construct ideas that interfere with our effortless-effort to become one with our target, which brings us to one of the central tenets of the Ch'an teaching ascribed to Bodhi Dharma are:           

            "A special transmission outside the scriptures;
            No dependence upon words and letters;
            Pointing directly to the heart (intuitive mind) of man;
            Seeing into one's own nature
            And attainment of Buddhahood.¹

In fewer words, thinking interferes with the kind of spontaneity necessary to assure the uninterrupted flow of a series of connected actions. This kind of unusual perceptual acuity forces one to go beyond the simple act of aiming with the external senses. The consciousness found in Zen awareness directs one beyond the dark fears blocking transformation and change so we can expand into the blue sky of spiritual unity by linking past-present-future in ONE MIND. Like all higher spiritual practices, this means that both object and subject are no longer separated by the impositions of our emotional and personal limitations, as is humanly possible.

To enhance the process of reaching your personal goals quickly and ergonomically, try the following visualization: See your target/goal and your Self as essentially two points on one sphere. Also let go of all thoughts, feelings, or memories that hinder your focus and accentuate the possibility of error. Now connect them by drawing a line from one point to the other on your imaginary sphere.

Remember this suggestion: you and your target appear to be separate entities, but both are fragments of a whole that begin and end in your perspectives of self.

Eugen Herrigel (1953), clearly teaches this in the book The Zen of Archery as follows:

"The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull's-eye which confronts him. This state of unconscious is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill, though there is in it something of a quite different order which cannot be attained by any progressive study of the art...."

So we learn that merely 'shooting our arrow in the air and letting it fall we know not where,' only adds to the potential failure of union with our target. As the old saying instructs, know thyself, which inevitably involves the realization of the ONENESS that always exists between self and God.

   1 "Chinese Art" by W. Speiser, R. Goepper, and J. Fribourg, trans. Diana Imber; Universe Books, New York, 1964. Vol. 3.