tirpassion wrote:
On the other side, I have qualified in 4 events for the the French Nationals of Muzzleloaders
. Happy that I could make it with just 3 days of training and practice.
Amazing muscle memory but then equally amazing is how muscle memory atrophies with the shooter's self confidence and his state of mind. Difference lies in "ummm....can I do it..." as against " I'm gonna have some fun... lets shoot..."
in other words, it's all in your mind, which if you reflect deeply also speaks volumes on the school of thought which advocates and or emphasises the importance of muscle memory. If muscle memory is over arching and so important, then why does the same muscle memory hinge so much on the shooter's state of mind?
Tir has just demonstrated the veracity of the argument from his statement.
The other example i would like to quote is that of Eklavya, who shot arrows into a dogs mouth just to silence his barking. When Dronacharya witnessed this, he was understandably taken aback. How could anyone have such mastery over his archery skills?
The point I am making here is not what followed, but HOW Eklavya managed to acquire these skills,WITHOUT a master?
I will attempt to answer: It is called the single pointed focus of the brain, a brain, which I may add, has achieved a highly evolved state, whereby a single thought has so much energy, that it manifests itself into kinetic energy, energising lifeless matter ( like an arrow) to achieve the goal of the thought.
The goal of the thought was to silence the dog's barking, Eklavya, with his evolved mind, just 'thought out the path of the arrow, the arrow followed the path...
Now how does a brain get so evolved?
An ordinary brain witnesses a lot of traffic in terms of random thoughts triggered mostly as a response to the external stimuli received from the five senses. For example, you witness a pretty woman walking down the road and well.. this external stimuli triggers of many thoughts...like an untrained dog, who runs around sniffing here and there, the brain too wastes its energy on meaningless paths which have no end but mental gratification.
But the brain of a Yogi, like that of Eklavya, is different. The Yogi makes his brain tremendously powerful. How? By repeating a mantra again and again a thousand and million times. Initially the young yogi or the initiate has great difficulty in keeping his mind single pointed ( keeping it focussed on one thought), but with practice, he does manage to keep his mind focussed on only the mantra to the exclusion of all random trivial thoughts.
Now when this happens, initially the brain revolts, naturally because it is not used to being single pointed or focussed on just one thought. But over time and with a lot of practise, the brain gets used to this concept. But what happens is.. that the very same brain which was wasting all this tremendous thought energy NOW suddenly finds itself with a burgeoning dam of energy which it cannot expend in trivial paths or leakages. So the dam begins to fill, now since there is no other place to go, the brain has no other option but to adapt and become more efficient. The brain now ethereally expands to contain this ever growing energy and in the process develops super human powers. Like a lens concentrating ordinary sunlight into a single point of focus which results in fire. The very same way, the thought energy develops so much power that it changes its form (from diffused sunlight into fire).
Eklavya did just that...
And Einstein wrote an equation on it, which simply stated, says that both matter and energy are interconvertible (E=mc2)