Eons ago, the mighty Warrior Sage Parasurama threw his axe across the waters of India’s Southwest Coast, and the land that lay submerged emerged. This land had great potential but was barren, so the sage invoked the help of the Snake King Vasuki who spat magic poison which made the land fertile, lush and green. There was one big problem though: many enemies set their sights on conquering this beautiful region. So to protect his land, Parasurama established 42 holy training grounds and taught 21 appointed masters the art and science of vanquishing enemies in close combat.
That’s the legendary origin story of the South Indian state of Kerala, and its indigenous martial art Kalaripayattu.
In terms of actual history, there's a pretty heated debate about whether Kalaripayattu is in fact the world’s oldest martial art. That title probably goes to some form of wrestling, but at the end of the day I don’t know for sure, nor does the historical record.
There’s also the narrative about how the sage Bodhidharma who helped train the Shaolin monks in martial arts was, in fact, teaching them Kalaripayattu, which is why it’s often thought that Kung Fu is directly derived from Kalaripayattu. And as you can imagine these claims are not controversial at all and the people who hear them get along and never start flame wars that amount to absolutely nothing but a colossal waste of everyone’s time. Oh wait, they do. A lot.
While historians - and angry internet people - tug back and forth on the historicity of these claims, one of the most interesting and well recorded aspects of this Martial Art has actually been overlooked: and that is its psychology.
The closer you look at Kalaripayattu, you begin to see that it was designed as a comprehensive physical and psychological system to achieve self-transcendence. And I don’t mean this in the generic sense of becoming your best self. I mean the term ‘self-transcendence’ quite literally, that is, to put yourself into a state where you feel like you’ve gone beyond the bounds of time, space and personal identity.
So how does Kalaripayattu do this? Let’s zoom out a bit.
By the time we get to the 12th century, Kalaripayattu was everywhere in Kerala, and it forms a central part of the identity of virtually every village. It was a rite of passage for young men, and people often practiced it until the day they died, devoting their life to it, in the religious sense of the term. The Kalari, or the training ground for the practice of Kalaripayattu, was considered holy. It usually doubled as a place of healing and as a site of worship.
The spiritual practice of Kalaripayattu wasn’t limited to rituals and contemplative meditation before and after the training; it was an essential part of the training itself. For instance, one of the key forms of practice was to meditate on the form of weapons technique over and over again until you begin to accurately hear the sounds of the weapons clashing in your mind.
Speaking of weapons, unlike other martial arts, the final stage of Kalaripayattu mastery is the inverse of many other traditions…the last stage is verumkai, the art of fighting with your bare hands regardless of whether your opponents are armed, unarmed, many or few. The spiritual nature of Kalaripayattu is not just about racking up techniques, it is very much about stripping away every layer of your ego that stands in between yourself and pure awareness of the present moment.
In this way Kalaripayattu starts looking more like a true spiritual sub-culture than just a martial art. As the anthropologist and martial arts practitioner Philip Zarrilli puts it:
“[Kalaripayattu] is not simply a test of strength and will between two human beings like modern boxing, but rather a contest between a host of unstable and immanent divine powers to which each combatant gains access through their training and mystic rituals”
The spiritual character of Kalaripayattu didn’t dissipate as people from non-Hindu religions took up the artform. In fact, it took on a beautifully syncretic form - meaning it absorbed elements from various religious traditions, enriching its own spiritual and cultural dimensions.
Christians and Muslims, alongside Hindus, practiced it, each incorporating their own religious symbols and prayers into the rituals and ceremonies of the Kalari. So the spiritual aspect of Kalaripayattu remains the key piece of the practice.
As one Kalari Master says:
“The aim of kalaripayattu is to be able to fight, but when you learn the system very well you will find yourself moving away from an interest in fighting and toward more spiritual goals. The kalari itself is a place where god is present. When you enter the kalari, salute the deities, and perform the rituals of the kalari, you sloawly find yourself getting closer to god.”
But what is it about this martial art that makes it so conducive to a sense of spiritual connection? This connection is so vital that many masters agree that Kalaripayattu minus spirituality is not real Kalaripayattu. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to matter much whether it’s a primarily Hindu, Christian, Muslim or Secular sense of the spiritual, but “without the spiritual side” it cannot be called Kalaripayattu, as one master says, it breaks down into just a bunch of fighting techniques.
So the protectiveness - or some may call it gatekeeping - around Kalaripayattu is focused not on who’s doing the worshiping or in the name of which god - but on preserving the element of worship itself. This may be why kalaripayattu fits into so many spiritual traditions so elegantly, but withers into just mechanical movements when the spiritual side is taken away.
Simply put, Kalaripayattu is a sacred spiritual art form.
And many Kalari masters would rather have their art-form die out than turn into just an alternative ethnic hobby for bored gym bros or angry Yoga with Adriene or a way for parents to pull their gamer kids away from their screens for at least an hour each day. But this is exactly what Kalari is turning into these days, and for every purist there is someone who wants to popularize the artform in the economic mainstream. For better or for worse, it is what it is.
Instead of crying over spilt meaning, I want to take a more constructive route and look at the vital, living psychology at work behind the art form that gives it its spiritual character. And by exploring the secular psychology of the sacred and spiritual, I hope to be able to contribute to the appreciation for this beautiful artform as it enters the mainstream to survive.
Who better to call in to support this quest than the big dog of transpersonal psychology, Abraham Maslow, who you probably already know from his most famous idea, the ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, represented by this chart:
Maslow dedicated most of his career to understanding how to unlock human potential. Specifically he spent a lot of time understanding how people can achieve a sense of self-actualization - which is living in alignment with your highest values, consciously achieving mastery over yourself and realizing your true potential.
Self actualization was of course at the very top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
But a few years before he died, Maslow started to revise his most famous idea. He started seeing self-actualization - his own proposed pinnacle of human potential as incomplete. In his unpublished personal notes revealed after his death in 1970, Maslow expressed concerns over self-actualization being too individualistic. The true pinnacle of human potential was something else. Maslow called it self-transcendence.
To understand self-transcendence, we have to understand what Maslow called peak experiences and plateau experiences. Maslow said this of peak experiences:
"[They are] rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality, and are even mystic and magical in their effect upon the experiencer. It is the feeling of great ecstasy and wonder and awe, the loss of placing in time and space and, finally, the conviction that something extremely important and valuable had happened, so that the subject is to some extent transformed and strengthened even in his daily life by such experiences.”
So peak experiences seem to be defined by a sense of stepping outside the phenomenology of ordinary human experience. Maslow believed that self-actualized people have peak experiences more often and at higher intensities. Peak experiences became kind of a marker in Maslow’s psychology for identifying self-actualized people. Not every peak experience is had by a self-actualized person but every self-actualized person has peak experiences, and generally lots of them. It’s a rapture of vital energy that feels like mystical contact, and Maslow even saw peak experiences and people trying to communicate them, induce them in others and create values that may bring more people to achieve peak experiences as the origin story of every religion.
But before he died, Maslow wrote about something that he considered to be beyond peak experiences, called plateau experience. He actually got the term from U. A. Asrani, who was a Professor of Physics at Banaras Hindu University and a yoga practitioner.
Maslow describes plateau experiences as:
“…a kind of unitive consciousness … the simultaneous perception of the sacred and the ordinary. There is a paradox because it is miraculous and yet it doesn’t produce an autonomic burst. This type of consciousness has certain elements in common with peak experiences— like awe, mystery, surprise, and esthetic shock but are constant rather than climactic. The words I would use to describe this kind of experience would be a ‘‘high plateau.’’
And unlike peak experiences, plateau experiences can be turned on and off by the experiencer. And this sense of control is key to understanding self-transcendence. In contrast with a merely self-actualized person who attracts more frequent and intense peak experiences, a self-transcending person is able to ride the lighting of the peak experience so well that it turns into a plateau. You’re able to go in and out of the state as you wish.
Funnily enough, it’s when you transcend the boundaries of your sense of self, that you are able to gain the ultimate self-control of being able to access this unitive psychological experience at will. Maslow links transcendence and the plateau experience in the following words:
“Transcendence can mean to live in the realm of the plateau. After the insight or the great conversion, or the great mystic experience, or the great illumination, one can calm down as the novelty disappears, and as one gets used to great things, live casually in heaven and be on easy terms with the eternal and infinite. I can then even feel some subjective equivalent of what has been attributed to the gods only, i.e., omniscience, omnipotence, ubiquity. Perhaps the best word in order to stress that this is part of human nature, even though at its best, is the word metahumanness.”
When you dig into the major religious traditions, you begin to see that they all had terms for this psychological state. In Hinduism, you find sahaja or ‘‘natural’’ samadhi in which full spiritual or transcendental consciousness coexists with full outer awareness but free from ego-sense.
As the writer and academic Arthur Osborne says:
“The final state is ‘‘stabilization’’ and is beyond ecstasy pure, universal consciousness flows through a man, uses his faculties and performs the function which you ascribe to the ego, only much better.”
You find the same or very similar ideas in Sufism as Baqua or Haquiqat, the Bodhisattva state in Buddhism, the Vita-Raga state in Jainism, and the Unitive state in Christianity.
Now with all this context in mind let's turn back to Kalaripayattu, and it becomes pretty clear why it's an artform that both lends itself to integration into so many different religious traditions, and keeps its spiritual core intact even when studied in a secular context. And we also begin to understand why Kalaripayattu without the spiritual core is not kalaripayattu.
That’s because Kalaripayattu is not just training the body to kick ass, it’s training the spirit to stabilize sacred consciousness, gain autonomy over plateau experiences and achieve self-transcendence. But instead of the stereotypical ideas of achieving self-transcendence by meditating in a dark room or by doing a heroic dose of shrooms in your college dorm, Kalaripayattu does it through the single-mind pursuit of conquering fear.
Zarrilli says this about Kalaripayattu’s system of progression which moves from:
“…the familiar human condition of mental, disequilibrium, lack of focus and loss of mental power 'caused, by our normative human frailties, to a transformative state of concentrated awareness in which all doubts, emotional upset and consciousness itself are transcended. It is an activated state of single-minded doing.
It 'entails no loss of consciousness, or "dissociation" in psychological terms, but rather a heightened sense of consciousness . . . ' in which 'one's consciousness has not traveled somewhere else, like a shaman, but instead, one's own body and mind are taken over and animated by a higher and more powerful and concentrated form of consciousness”
And what does the state feel like? A calm and pure fury where your body’s awareness is so heightened that it’s as if your body has been transformed into a thousand eyes all locking into the present moment. A lightning storm of a peak experience that’s been harnessed into an electric plateau through self-control. It’s the simultaneous ascension into something more than human while descending into the purely instinctive state of a wild animal observing its natural environment.
So this is all to say: I should definitely get my 10,000 steps in today and I am in absolute awe of this ancient art form, and it’s helped me gain an appreciation for all other martial arts as techniques for pushing beyond our preconceived limits and infusing the ordinary with the sacred in everyday life.
Love,
Yepi
Primary references:
Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (1971).
Phillip B. Zarilli, When the Body Becomes All Eyes: Paradigms, Discourses and Practices of Power in Kalarippayattu, a South Indian Martial Art (2000).
Stanley Krippner, The Plateau Experience: A. H. Maslow and Others, The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (1972).