There is much talk of Zen in the martial arts. Mushin is a Zen concept meaning, as best as I can understand it, acting without conscious thought. Being in a state where there is no delay in action caused by having to think about your response. Zen is a concept I no nothing about, which is not surprising having grown up in 1970's Britain. I wonder if Eastern concepts such as Zen are not as mystical as they first appear to people like me. Mushin seems to refer to being on autopilot, reacting automatically to a situation such as hand to hand combat. This is similar to modern educational theory about how we learn skills: At first we are unconsciously unaware (we don't know we don't know something), then we become consciously unaware (we know we don't know something). As we decide we should learn the technique, we move into conscious awareness (as we are trying to learn the skill) and then at last we master it and move into unconscious awareness (we can do it automatically), like driving a car, it requires no thought. I think this is Mushin.
In the car driving example, it you stopped to think about every gear change, every bend or alteration in velocity, your driving would probably deteriorate. It's the same with karate as it is with mastering any physical skill. Neurologically, in conscious awareness, brain activity is cortical however, when we have really mastered a skill and have unconscious awareness, we process this at a deeper, more primitive, cerebellar level. So perhaps there is a Western scientific explanation for what those wise people in the East have intuitively known all along and we have doubted?
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