How You See Can Change Your Life.

Based on many true stories

When I was a young man of thirteen, I loved to watch the series, Kung Fu, starring David Carradine as Caine or Grasshopper. In fact, I know now that the early exposure through this series of the ancient wisdom of the Tao Te Ching and the Sage Chuang Tzu left an impressionable mark on me and led to my interest and practice of mindfulness when I was seventeen.

This ancient wisdom is hinted at throughout the The Mindfulness Movie if you know where to look.

In one show first broadcast on ABC, in November, 1973, Caine helps a missionary woman rescue a Chinese boy from slavery to a member of the Dragon of Retribution Tong. When the missionary woman asks Caine if he would like to learn to become a Christian, he says:

“I have a path. I seek not to change it but to follow it…I seek only to become a cup. Empty of myself. Filled with oneness.”

Besides directly expressing the core idea of the Tao, which is seeing and living without being entirely cannibalized by ego or self. It also gives rise to the idea that a glass in never half full or half empty, one gives rise to the other. They are codependent of each other and therefore co-arise. In the The Mindfulness Movie, during the gunfight scene, Mindful tells Mindless,

“Don’t you see you have both, mindless and mindful. You can choose which one you use.”

Again, they are co-dependent and co-arise together, when you are mindful, you are not mindless, thus when you are mindless, you are not mindful. The truth is that one allows you to recognize the other, just as beauty allows you to recognize ugliness and dark allows you to see light.