Warrior Philosophy in Game of Thrones (7 page)

“You will marry a high lord and rule his castle, and your sons shall be knights and princes and lords.”

To which Arya replies:

“No, that's not me.”
[xix]

Anyone who has been paying attention can see she is right!  Even as young as she is, she knows who she is.  There is another sweet moment, full of pathos when Ned Stark says:

“War was easier than daughters.”
[xx]

Ned Stark is a man that in many ways knows himself well.  I think it is because he knows his flaws as a father, because he knows that he struggles with it, that he makes such a good father.  In this way self-knowledge has the potential to enable us to become skilful at what we are not gifted at.  If I don't know that I am unskilled at something then I have no opportunity to improve at it. I'd suggest that Ned's weak points are most pronounced around the places where he is unconscious of his weakness.  When he knows he is not good at something and can admit it he is willing to do the hard work to improve.  When he is just plain unconscious of a flaw, of course, he can do nothing about it.  One example of such a flaw is his honour.  He is so rigid about his own sense of honour that he finds it very hard to live with the fact of his failures in living to his own standards.  He won't talk about Jon Snow's mother, he gets upset at being reminded of his infidelity and is clearly very hard on himself about it as King Robert observes on the road to King's Landing.  As James Baldwin once said:

"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced."

Ned is so active in suppressing the flaws in his own honour that it blinds him to the flaws of others as well.  He makes unreasonable, superhuman demands on himself, and unconsciously expects more of other people in terms of honourable behaviour than they are ever likely to give.  In many ways it is this more than anything else that proves his undoing: he expects Lord Littlefinger and the Gold-cloaks to do as they say they will, and Cersei and the court to respect Robert's dying wishes.  His unconscious assumptions about honour and trust leave him open to betrayal.  Once again, the truth of Jung's perspective is borne out:

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”

In Ned Stark's case his unwillingness to really face his own darkness means he is blind to the darkness in others.  Terminally blind as it works out.  A conversation between Petyr Baelish and Roz, the whore from Winterfell who travels to King's Landing speaks directly to this point:

Ros says:

“What she don't know won't hurt her.”

To which Petyr replies:

“A stupid saying.  What we don't know is usually what gets us killed.”
[xxi]

For Ned Stark, this is true both of what he doesn't know about others and his environment, and what he doesn't know about himself.

Samwell Tarly, like Arya Stark is a good example of self-knowledge.  He knows he is a coward.  In the context that I am writing about warrior philosophy, that may seem a strange quality to use as a good example!  However, as I've talked about with Ned Stark, if you don't know something, you can't deal with it.  Because Sam knows he is a coward, he can face that and deal with it.  He struggles profoundly in dealing with his cowardice in the field of combat – of course he does – but there are other ways to be brave and skilful than with a sword and fortunately Jon Snow, Maester Aemon, and Lord Commander Mormont are wise enough to see this.  Sam gets given a job that makes use of his gifts.  As well as helping others to see him for who and what he is, Sam's open acknowledgement of his own cowardice also gives him a kind of strength.  While there are many ways that Ser Allister Thorne and some of the new recruits in the Night's Watch can torment Sam, calling him “Coward” is not one of them.  Just as I described in the example from Native American philosophy, because Sam owns his cowardice, no-one can harm him with it.  There is a way that, whatever his gifts and flaws, Sam is who he is, and I can admire him for that. 

As Chogyam Trungpa says:

“The key to warriorship... is not being afraid of who you are.  Ultimately, that is the definition of bravery: not being afraid of yourself.”
[xxii]

By this definition, I would say that Sam is very brave.  He knows himself and he is not afraid of himself.  I will say more about Sam's particular brand of courage in the next chapter on that subject, but for now I just want to emphasise that he knows and faces the realities of his own character and that in itself is to be admired – that is one version of being a warrior, no matter how you fare in a fight against an outer opponent.  You have faced the inner opponent and sometimes that is the harder task, as we see in the example of Ned Stark's failure to confront his own darkness.

This idea of facing your own 'inner opponents' before turning to face the outer ones is spoken of very directly in The Hagakure – one of the classics of the Way of the Samurai:

“Narutomi Hyogo said, “What is called winning is defeating one's allies.  Defeating one's allies is defeating oneself, and defeating oneself is vigorously overcoming one's own body.

It is as though a man were in the midst of ten thousand allies but not a one were following him.  If one hasn't previously mastered his mind and body, he will not defeat the enemy.”
[xxiii]

The men who's thoughts and philosophies were recorded in this book were fiercely practical men of action.  This was not based on an idea of what winning took but on concrete experience of going into battle and single combat and testing themselves.  If they are saying that facing the inner battle and knowing yourself is what counts, then I think that is worth listening to!

One of the twenty principles of Karate which I referenced in chapter 1 also speaks to me of the need to face your own 'inner opponents' before facing the outer ones:

“First know yourself, then know others”

I think what Gichin Funakoshi was getting at when he set this as one of his twenty principles is that we see the world through filters.  None of us really sees the world as it is.  At a basic biological level, we receive information about the world through a set of organs and senses which are necessarily limited.  Just by existing we are bombarded by so much raw data that if we could perceive it all we could never process it all and our brains would be overloaded in even the attempt.  So our sensory organs are tuned in to certain ranges or frequencies of data which are most vital to our functioning.  Even just those ranges of data are overwhelmingly large and complex, so after we receive this limited bandwidth of information, it is further filtered, edited and digested within our brain and a tiny portion of it is presented to our conscious minds for use in choosing our actions.  As you can probably see, that's a lot of filtering!  So much is disregarded or suppressed.  That limited range of data is filtered further by our psychological state in that moment.  An example of this might be:

You are walking through a quiet part of town and it is quite late at night.  As you pass a shop window you notice a beautifully carved chair which is just the thing you have been looking for as a reading chair.  The shop is closed as it's late, but you start looking to see if you can see a price on the chair, a phone number for the shop so you can call first thing in the morning to ask them to hold it, and an opening time so you can come back and buy it.

All of a sudden you hear a loud bang!  It sounds like a gunshot.  Your heart races and you start looking for the source of the sound, listening to see if you can hear someone nearby, looking for different ways to head back home, your mind flashing through all the ways you might run to safety...Is that someone in the shadows across the street...?

There is another bang.  This time the sky lights up and you realise that they are fireworks!  By the gold and green light of the 'rocket' you see that there is no-one across the street just a plant growing up the side of the building.  You feel relived and almost like laughing – how silly to be so scared!  Taking a breath of the night air you can smell a bonfire maybe a couple of streets over, and you can hear some faint cheers for the firework display.  You see another launch into the sky and decide to stand and watch a bit.  Blue and red falling stars scatter across the sky... It's a beautiful night...

In each paragraph of this example your focus would be entirely different.  Once you notice the chair, everything else disappears and you tune out your environment.  With the perceived gunshot, the chair is forgotten and your environment is swiftly assessed based on the limited criteria of possible danger, and possible escape.  With the firework realisation the shop and even the streets are soon forgotten as you look to the skies.  We are constantly filtering the data we receive about our environment based on what seems important in the moment and much of the rest will be lost to our conscious awareness.  There is a famous experiment about this in which a video was made where 2 groups of people, one lot in white, one lot in black, are passing basket balls
[13]
.  For the experiment people were asked to count how many times the basketball is passed between the people in white.  Plenty of people get that right.  What the majority of people miss is the fact that a guy in a monkey suit walks through the group throwing basket balls, beats his chest and then walks out the other side of the shot.  The amazing thing is that the majority of people taking part in the experiment, when asked if they saw the gorilla, had missed it entirely!  The typical response was: “What Gorilla?!”  The participants in the study had got so focused on the task of counting the passes of the ball that they tuned out everything else.  We selectively filter, tune in to and tune out so much. 
What
we filter will be determined not only by our biology but by our psychological state (survival in the gun example, attention with the chair in the shop – or the gorilla!), our beliefs and our values.  If I believe the world to be a beautiful place then I will tend to notice that which is beautiful, if I believe it is ugly, I will notice the ugliness.  That doesn't mean that I am completely in control of my world and if I don't notice danger, then it can't harm me – that's delusional narcissism!  However, the world in our awareness is amazingly variable, and far less concrete than most people imagine.  If I am always on the lookout for danger, I am likely to find it.  Where one person sees a potential criminal hiding in his hooded sweatshirt, someone else might see a guy trying to keep his ears warm on a windy day.  What the truth is for the guy in the hood may be something else again.

How this all applies in a martial environment is that if you don't have some awareness of what you tend to filter out, then you may be missing important information.  If I have an unconscious belief that women are not as good in a fight as men (which, I hasten to add, I don't – I've known some fearsome women!) then I could underestimate a dangerous female opponent.  If however, I increase my self-knowledge and realise that I have this prejudice then while I may still disregard women at first glance, there is a chance at least that I will check myself and reassess the situation.  If I don't know myself then it will do me little good finding out about my opponent.  However I assess them will pass through my many filters and unless I have some knowledge of what those filters are (particularly beliefs and values) then I will dismiss much of the useful information I have gathered. 

This all applies just as much in daily life as it does in a martial context.  Without cultivating self-knowledge, I could be ignoring potential opportunities left, right and centre.  I could be misjudging my friends, misunderstanding my family, passing over business opportunities because I have an unconscious belief that I could never achieve something like that, and just plain missing the beautiful moments in life because I have dismissed it as irrelevant data.  All of this could be going on unconsciously, my entire life could be being run by my habitual ways of thinking.  Free Will is a result of self-knowledge: You are only as free as you are aware.  To quote Jim Morrison:

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first. You can take away a man's political freedom and you won't hurt him- unless you take away his freedom to feel. That can destroy him. That kind of freedom can't be granted. Nobody can win it for you.”
By now you are probably seeing how vital an internal awareness is to living the Warrior's Path, and how self-awareness is key if you are to stay on that Path with any consistency.  For the final part of this chapter I want to look briefly at how you can bring the discipline of self-knowledge to noticing the ways and the places that your internal world, leaks into the external world.  In the Hagakure, it says:

“A warrior should not say something fainthearted even casually.  He should set his mind to this beforehand.  Even in trifling matters the depths of one's heart can be seen.”
[xxiv]