Just as a picture and example win over a simple rumor on the way to the heart of someone who wants to learn, so too is a reality show more popular with the general public than fictional romance novels. At the very least, it is easier for the natural and normative human being under the laws of nature to approach a reality show than a novel.
However, an equally valid argument is that fictional romance novels are actually more real than the immediate satisfaction of the optic nerve’s dopamine-driven mechanism, which caters to selfish desires—how so?
In a fictional romance novel, there is often an encounter with real human layers that the writer has distilled into a very strong essence of universal truth, even though the character does not exist in reality and cannot be met through the eye. This essence uses fiction as a medium to convey relevant truth—just as imagination leads to action, even though it is imagination. Thus, fiction is a kind of upgraded decoding mechanism for the raw, meaningless electricity flowing from the lens (the eye) to the optic nerve (the conductor) to the processing container (the brain).
Therefore, it can even be argued that the intense desire of people today to seek “things seen by the eye” actually distances them from the truth, as it is the lowest level of consciousness, factually shared with animals and sometimes far less sophisticated than that of the animal, above which we consider ourselves.
“You have to see it to believe it,” says the famous saying, which contains an underlying assumption about the eye-reality connection deeply rooted in the education of many of us from childhood.
Just as a picture and example win over a simple rumor on the way to the heart of someone who wants to learn, so too is a reality show more popular with the general public than fictional romance novels. At the very least, it is easier for the natural and normative human being under the laws of nature to approach a reality show than a novel.
However, an equally valid argument is that fictional romance novels are actually more real than the immediate satisfaction of the optic nerve’s dopamine-driven mechanism, which caters to selfish desires—how so?
In a fictional romance novel, there is often an encounter with real human layers that the writer has distilled into a very strong essence of universal truth, even though the character does not exist in reality and cannot be met through the eye. This essence uses fiction as a medium to convey relevant truth—just as imagination leads to action, even though it is imagination. Thus, fiction is a kind of upgraded decoding mechanism for the raw, meaningless electricity flowing from the lens (the eye) to the optic nerve (the conductor) to the processing container (the brain).
Therefore, it can even be argued that the intense desire of people today to seek “things seen by the eye” actually distances them from the truth, as it is the lowest level of consciousness, factually shared with animals and sometimes far less sophisticated than that of the animal, above which we consider ourselves.
Is Color False?
One of the proofs that the things seen by the eye are not absolute truth is the difference in how every living creature, including the sexes of the same species, sees color in different ways and intensities. If what is seen were absolute truth, how could different living creatures see it differently?
It is known to researchers that women see more shades of red than men, just as it is known that dogs have less extensive color detail in their vision, or the hawk’s amazing attention to ultraviolet hues that humans cannot perceive at all.
In the science of optics, it is well known about the significant bias each researcher has when looking at colored data through a microscope. Therefore, the scientific use of monochromatic “black and white” cameras is very common—they eliminate the unscientific bias of color issues and focus solely on shades of gray. This makes it easier to study light rays, living cells, and materials.
In photography, professional fashion photographers sometimes shoot and edit their photos in black and white to better understand the relationship between lighting and the model being photographed—where there is too much light, where there is too little. This is very difficult to examine in full color because the human eye cannot distinguish between a naturally bright color and a color that is simply better lit than another.
This is not to suggest that color is a negative mechanism in evolution at all, but simply to give an example that human vision alone is not the absolute truth as we have been taught—that the things seen by the eye should not be the focus when we come to learn new facts.
For example, in the medical condition known as “synesthesia,” there is a direct neural connection in the brain between color processing and taste processing, so those individuals may “taste” a certain color even though it doesn’t make logical sense. So who is the blind one, the person who only perceives color or the one who perceives color and taste simultaneously? It can be argued that the “healthy” person is actually blind compared to a person who sees color also in layers of taste, if we indulge in the prevalent and arrogant opinion that everything visible to the eye must be absolute truth.
From potential to action
If so, the constant pursuit of “what we observe” that has taken over the mind of the modern scientist, as well as the soul of the news addict, the media consumer, or the diligent athlete seeking to learn the art of skill development, is a pursuit that cannot be the focus that should address the root of the problem and lead to intuitive judgment of good and evil, truth and falsehood, or performance-oriented psychomotor skills spontaneously.
Just as we wouldn’t fix a damp ceiling inside the house simply by painting the ceiling (the action), but rather address the root cause (the potential) by sealing the hole that opened under the external tiles, we should not address athletic problems with an atomistic thinking about the muscle supposed to serve us in that action and which exercise is supposed to strengthen it.
Instead, we should first address the things hidden from the eye—inspiration, imagination, imitation of the best among us, causality, and multisensory anticipation of the impending ability. Creating the proper foundation for spontaneous and artistic performances, which express the internal soul rolling with minimal friction of its different parts—and only then do we arrive at the action, which, even though it uses those “false” parts like subjective vision, will be true—because now those false parts will be armored against irrelevance, inherent falsehood, and the difficulty in processing information that characterizes the “seeing is believing” approach.
We can illustrate this complicated passage simply: Take a pair of parents who want the happiness and prosperity of their beloved 15-year-old son, so they tell him, “My son, you must study medicine and learn stock market investments, because it is statistically known that medicine provides a stable salary and stock investments are common among the world’s wealthy, and this will lead to happiness.”
On the surface, the parents are scientifically and statistically correct. So why did we feel a pang in our hearts from the mere declaration of the parents’ decree to the child? What, are we denying science?
However, statistical decisions need to come from a deeper internal world to gain the fuel to burn, or in other words—we should not try to ignite the educational fire from scratch ourselves, but rather look for an existing ember and then blow on it.
In other words, finding the ember serves as an inspirational point existing in the soul, leading to a path of least resistance up the ladder of action—a desirable thing, especially when talking about spontaneous abilities like creative thinking or athletic performances.
Athletic Atheism
After this introduction, we can characterize athletic atheism in the following way: “Any physical activity that emphasizes instruction over the spirit of things,” or, “any technical activity that emphasizes what is seen and ignores what is hidden from view.” That is, the term atheism is used to highlight the philosophy of “not believing without pictures,” which is common among atheists who seek to learn reality as it is without theories.
This can be interpreted both mentally-spiritually and physically.
Physically, the natural emphasis of an athlete on “visible” mechanics alone can manifest as neglect of what happens behind the body and in the supporting structures, such as the posterior muscle chain, the movement of the back hand, or any focus on the ball/heel as required. The athletic atheist will focus only on what they see: the toes, knees, front hand, and head bent forward. Their body screams, “What I don’t see doesn’t exist,” and thus the untrained athlete appears hunched forward, perpetually bent into their fetal position from their mother’s womb.
Spiritually, the athletic atheist will seek the immediate, precise formula for the goal they want to achieve and will reject long-term, deep-soul solutions that are supposed to lead to truly creative spontaneous performances rather than repeating “homework” during a game.
The “obvious thing” as the enemy of performance
One of the reasons the Red Fox system is so flexible is because it doesn’t take a collection of studies on speed and apply them as a template for athletes. For example, from a collection of studies on various 100-meter Olympic finalists, we can see different techniques, different stride lengths, different frequencies, some who train heavily in the gym and some who do not. Some are tall and some are short. Some use long ground contact times with high power output, while others utilize quick ground contacts. Some collapse inward toward the arch of the foot, and some do not. All are talented—and all are in the 100-meter world final, so they cannot be arrogantly dismissed as “wrong.”
The science of biomechanics and kinesiology is true in that there are indeed efficient and inefficient levers, but the fact that a lever is efficient does not mean it must be used, just as the fact that thinner car tires save fuel does not compel the car manufacturer to install only thin tires on their sports cars—meaning biomechanical/physical truth is not necessarily the truth that should be used in this place, at this time.
There is a constant dance between dry physical information and its application in the field, for that specific “vehicle” that is supposed to serve in completely spontaneous field conditions and be reliable, resilient, and adaptable, both physically and cognitively. Therefore, the fact that a certain exercise or biomechanics has been researched as effective is just one card in the hand called spontaneous athletic performance.
Spontaneous performances
The ultimate goal of the coach when installing instructions, techniques, and insights into the body and heart of the athlete is to create spontaneous performances that originate from within the athlete and flow outward, rather than from the subservience of the trainee’s body to the coach’s mechanics.
When an athletic action occurs spontaneously, it means that the inner nature of that person is flashing and acting as actual energy operating in the world through the athletic action, not from the force of will but from deep motor readiness that has long left the parts of the brain requiring processing. Just as a flower opens its petals towards the sun in elegance, it performs a perfect synthesis with the world around it and responds to it gracefully, without thinking about how and why, because the correct mechanics are already ingrained in it. All that remains is to “come to the game and be who you always wanted to be”—to influence those you always wanted to influence.
Thus, the entire training process is an excuse to scan various biomechanical/physical factors (and hence it is important to know them) in the context of synthesis and the path of least resistance. It should be noted that an opposite approach, where the athlete has not learned anything new, is also a path full of resistance since the clock will still show a slow run. Therefore, the royal road is how to improve with the least mental resistance to the things being learned, and here is where the art of training is measured.
