Ooops

Funakoshi Principle #7: Accidents arise from negligence.

Another way of wording this is inattention and neglect cause misfortune. Once again, on the surface this physically means pay attention. If you are careless in practicing martial arts, someone could get hurt, and people do get hurt. So pay attention!

The deeper meaning of this principle is... Pay attention! Yet again, here we have what is really my own personal basic guiding principle in life, paying attention.

The Japanese have a concept called "satori", which can roughly translate as "excellence", but what satori really means is attentive focus and readiness. In his book Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Dan Millman's teacher, Socrates, shows him what satori feels like. He pulls out a knife and tells Dan to catch the knife when he throws it at hm. Naturally, Dan was scared half to death, but he figured he better damn well pay attention or he was about to get skewered. He might be getting skewered anyway...

Socrates never threw the knife, but Dan realized that the lesson was about how he felt when he thought Socrates was going to throw the knife. He went into a state of satori. Think about how you'd feel if someone told you they were about to throw a knife and you had to catch it.

Granted, we can't all pay attention like this all the time. Sales of headache medications would go through the roof, and Pfizer's stock would be a lot higher than it is now. However, there are other kinds of attention too, ones that take less effort. In our martial arts school, the Kodo School of Karate, we call one of them "Mind of Water". This state of consciousness is a quiet and relaxed readiness. You are not in satori, where you are trying to catch daggers, but you are attentive and awake, alert too, but not tense. Although you are not noticing every single detail of every little thing, you are tuned into the main flow of things and you understand what's happening around you as it happens.

Should anything arise that requires more attention, BANG. You switch into satori, and you focus on it. We call that "Mind of Mirror".

There is also a "Mind of Moon" where you are usually in Mind of Water, but with an added focus on trying to see everything at once in more detail. Mind of Moon talks more about noticing things with your senses: sight, sound, touch, intuition, whereas Mind of Water is a state of consciousness and may or may not deal with senses at any given time.

Neglecting to have at least one of these states active can result in accidents. Accidents mean that you missed something and it caused you to make a mistake.