Sailing a perfect course?
Published: Sat, 09/26/15
Is there a secret technique which bestows extraordinary power and skill
through Stav training? Or through any other comparable art for that
matter? I would never claim that Stav is the only body, mind and
spirit training system that works, it just happens to be my
preference. Have I discovered anything special in 40 years of
training in this kind of stuff and over 20 years of practising Stav
daily? Well, maybe, in that I could sum up the most fundamental
principle as AIM, action, intention and movement. There you are, I
have shared my secret of mastery, you are now a master too.
However, there are a couple of catches, as more discerning readers will no
doubt suspect. Firstly there is no ultimate and perfect technique to
discover because that is not how our particular universe works.
For example, take a ship moored on the West coast of Ireland and point
the ship directly at New York Harbour. Then set sail in exactly that
direction. Will the ship automatically find its way into the Hudson
River? Not a chance, even if the ship maintains exactly the same
direction that is started in there are far too many other variations
constantly affecting the course such as tides, winds and currents for
the course to stay true without corrections. Modern satellite
navigation systems make it much easier to see when the ship is off
course and to make the appropriate correction. Modern technology may
make the corrections so accurately that it seems as if the ship is
sailing on a dead straight line from the home port to the
destination. However, that is an illusion and in fact course errors
are constantly being detected and corrections made. In the case of
nautical navigation the intention is to reach a specific port,
movement is setting sail and steaming into the ocean and action/s
is/are the course corrections.
Before the days of satellite navigation (which is within my lifetime)
navigators relied upon a combination of compass, triangulating radio
location beacons and fixing position using chronometer and sextant.
The further back in history you go the more problematic navigation
was. The Vikings seem to have relied on the stars and some kind of
sun compass which we do not fully understand
now. I have included a link at the bottom if you want to read more
about it.
Whether your navigation system tells you when you have gone wrong by a couple
of metres or if you are 100 miles off course before you realise and
correct your direction the principle is the same. In this universe
there is no such thing as perfection, only being nearer
or further from the optimum fulfilment of a particular intention.
This is a reality worth pondering on. The greatest source of failure is
in not realising and accepting that whatever you do you will fail.
That is, failure in the sense that you will never achieve perfection.
However, if you have a clear intention, get moving and are willing
to act in order to correct your direction when necessary you
will still get somewhere, probably pretty close to where you want to
go. Just as Viking era sailors managed to
sail the North Atlantic between Norway and Greenland. That is about
1600 miles of stormy ocean.
Stav training is designed to help practitioners see the line that will
take them towards their intention. Over my 23 years of Stav practice I have found that
the axe training has been the single most effective tool for
learning to see the line. This is why we have made a video devoted to
the axe training and the next course in Salisbury on the 12th
of November will be devoted to training with the axe. See http://www.iceandfire.org.uk/train.html for more
details.
Regards
Graham
PS
More about Viking era navigation here
http://www.livescience.com/44366-vikings-sun-compass-after-sunset.html