Zen in the Art of Archary

Response Paper As I sat around thinking of how I could answer this question, I realized that I had never experienced the feeling where I lost my ordinary sense of self-consciousness that Eugen Herrigel describes. I can come up with numerous occurrences in my life where I lost track of time, but not the loss of self-consciousness as well. I would imagine it must take vigorous training to learn this skill of such magnitude. Of …

…the hit are no longer two opposing objects, but are one reality. This state of unconsciousness 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. When a man reaches this stage of "spiritual" development, he is a Zen artist of life.