Learn to "throw away"

When you look in the mirror, do you see a ghost? Sounds like an absurd question, but although many of us don't see a ghost staring back at us in the mirror, many of us act like ghosts throughout the day. Think about it, a ghost is caught in purgatory forced to relive some moment from their past over and over again. They hang around the same place and do the same thing.

Many of us spend our days relentlessly pursing some thing with the mindset, "If I could only get that thing then..." It is only after we acquire that thing (hopefully) that we realize its futility as we are no closer to happiness than when we started. Furuya Sensei called these things, "gendai seikatsu shukan byo" or modern lifestyle diseases.

Sensei advocated a type of "throw away" learning when he wrote, "As many people might think, learning is not a process of accumulation. This means that it is not a matter of taking and taking for one's self. In True Learning, throw away first. Take and throw away, take and throw away. People understand taking, but not throwing away. If I were to explain it in simple terms, "throwing away" means to take a fresh start in everything you do."

A ghost is someone who cannot "let go" and thus becomes trapped.

A true warrior knows that life is not about pushing themselves to acquire more and more but to learn how to let go of those things which hold them back.