Meet Bruce Lee is about the actor and martial artist who became revered in America for his Gung Fu style. Bruce Lee often compared his style to water. Water bends when you hit it, It absorbs the blow. At the same time, water can cut a giant canyon in the desert or punch a tunnel right through rock, given time. Water has a timeless quality to it. Wait long enough and it erodes mountains.
Water breaks free of structures designed to contain it. It leaks out of containers, overflows dams and evaporates from the reservoir. Lee said step one is to avoid limiting beliefs. They just hold you back. Self-actualization requires you to break your mold, to grow beyond your containers.
Lee said, "My personal message to people is that I hope they will go toward self-actualization rather than selfimage actualization. I hope that they will search within themselves for honest self-expression."
He described his approach to life, “Having no method as method; having no limit as limit.”
He said, “I am what I am here and now.”
Bruce Lee was a Philosophy major (me too!) and he believed that conceptual forms were empty of inherent essence, which he referred to as "form of no form." He may have been influenced by the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein or possibly, buddhism, which both portray similar concepts.
He describes his philosophy as Jeet Kune Do, the idea that true strength and adaptability come from understanding how seemingly opposing forces, like strength and suppleness, are actually complementary and interdependent. It's akin to the Hegelian dialectic. Our brains love to say it's either this way or that way but that doesn't always help. We are more successful when we bring the two halves of the whole together.
Seen that way, conflict is just another illusion.
"See that there is no one to fight, only an illusion to see through." -- Bruce Lee
Read Meet Bruce Lee in Flywheels (2024), page 180.
