The immortal sensei does magic for you. Let’s live forever! Let’s be immortal. Great idea I suppose, but then there are some horror movies built around that idea of being immortal, living forever. But it’s talking about being the immortal in the sense of the immortal teacher.

I know we have all engaged in this behavior of immortalizing our teacher. The words sound similar to this, “You should have seen what my sensei could do!” Remembering back to being a young kid, I was watching my Taekwondo instructor break a board.

Breaking a Board and My Mind

A guy who was holding the board to be broken was sitting on top of the shoulders of another guy. My teacher leaped into the air and broke the boards in two with a jumping front kick. Amazing to me! That moment is still stuck in my head to such a degree we are here and I am talking about it. There are many stories and No I don’t want to sound like Grandpa Wilder here. “You know back in my day,” or, “You should have seen, insert moment here.”

Sometimes it is appropriate to share a story if it is beneficial to the moment. One story I shared recently was I was watching John Roseberry do a kata. Roseberry was a bad dude in the sense that you know he knew how to roll. Roseberry was a Marine Corps drill instructor, 7-time Marine Corps Judo champ, and 4-time All Armed Forces Judo Campion. (If, by chance, I got a number wrong one way or the other the essence still stands, combative sports excellence.)

I remember watching him do the first karate kata we had learned. Roseberry did the kata and when he finished, turning to my friend and I said, “That’s what we’re doing.”  My friend finished my thought with, “Yeah but that’s not what we’re doing.”

Everything was the same except the movements being infused with this power and understanding. Power and understanding coming from years of study. Roseberry just took this same set of movements into the stratosphere of understanding and experience.

Stories of Our Teachers

Here I am talking about John Roseberry, there you are talking about your instructor your coach, whoever it might have been. Each of us is pointing to the thing that happened as the Immortal Sensei Does Magic for You.

The immortal Sensei will be remembered for a time. Until they’re forgotten by the 3rd or 4th generation away from their experiencing of the teacher.

These teachers are not going to make any new movement. They’re not going to make any new words; they’re not going to make any new anything.

So now they become, The Immortal Sensei Does Magic for You, or more accurately, the immortal sensei that did magic for you.

Then the canonization begins that occurs in our brains where we make a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, of the moment.

The Immortal Sensei Becomes Pale

The degrading of the information is inevitable. The moments are like a jpeg versus some sort of high-resolution graphic format. Do you know a Jpeg? You can send a Jpeg back and forth electronically with ease. Because the format goes in and says, “You know we don’t need this number, we don’t need this piece, we don’t need this pixel.” This lowers the resolution of the graphic file. As a result of this action, the file can move through the electronic system with ease.

But if you continue to do that over and over with a scan, or a photocopy pretty soon you have a kind of mosaic.