On Doing the Right Thing
Spoiler alert: This blog gives away story lines from the movie, The Karate Kid, and the television show, Cobra Kai.
The 80’s movie, The Karate Kid, came out when I was in high school and I loved it. It’s a story of an underdog, Daniel LaRusso (played by Ralph Macchio) who moves to the Los Angeles area from New Jersey with his single mother where he gets bullied by a bunch of boys at his school, led by Johnny Lawrence (played by William Zabka). An older man living in Daniel’s building, Mr. Miyagi (played by Noriyuki “Pat” Morita), comes to Daniel’s defense upon finding him getting beaten up by Johnny and his friends. Mr. Miyagi is from Okinawa, Japan and has trained in the art of karate. His philosophy is self-defense. Daniel is very taken by Mr. Miyagi’s ability as a practitioner of karate and asks him to teach him. The two become very good friends as Mr. Miyagi teaches Daniel, not only the art of karate, but also many life lessons. Towards the end of the film, Daniel goes on to win a major LA martial arts tournament, beating Johnny for the “All Valley” title.
Fast forward to 2018. In the television series, Cobra Kai, the youngsters in, The Karate Kid, are now middle-aged parents of high school-aged kids. Daniel has gone on to own a successful car dealership and to live in a beautiful house, with his lovely wife (Amanda, played by Courtney Henggeler), and two children Samantha (played by Mary Mouser, and her brother, Anthony, played by Griffin Santopietro). Johnny, meanwhile, is now an underdog. His glory days were in high school. Since then, he became an alcoholic and he has an estranged teenage son Robby Keene (played by Tanner Buchanan), who lives with his absentee, alcoholic mother (Shannon Keene, played by Diora Baird). Johnny has a hard time holding down a job and he lives in a building a lot like the one that Daniel grew up in.
In a parallel story line to, The Karate Kid, Johnny stumbles upon Miguel Diaz (played by Xolo Maridueña), a teenager who recently moved to his building with his mother and grandmother, getting beaten up by bullies from his school. (As an aside, have you ever wondered why every single generation of children discovers bullying? It’s amazing to me, at some level, that each generation reenacts these powerful dynamics. At another level, I have to remember that although children are, of course, vulnerable and deserving of protection, the ego thought-system is in everyone’s mind, children and adults alike.) Like Mr. Miyagi and Daniel, Johnny comes to Miguel’s defense and fights off the bullies. Miguel marvels at this and begs Johnny to teach him martial arts. One thing leads to another, and Johnny is inspired to open a dojo dedicated to teaching the form of martial arts that he learned when he was a teenager, namely Cobra Kai. Miguel becomes his star pupil, along with a group of other students from Miguel’s high school who are all underdogs.
During the first and second seasons of Cobra Kai, Daniel and Johnny again become rivals. Robby, who knows how his father feels about Daniel, gets a job at Daniel’s car dealership out of spite. Daniel, who at first doesn’t know that Robby is Johnny’s son, befriends and mentors him. He starts to teach Robby the philosophy and skills of Miyagi-do karate. When Robby’s mother takes off on an extended vacation and alcohol bender, Robby is at home alone for days at a time with no money or basic necessities. Upon finding out about this, Daniel and Amanda invite him to stay with them until his mother returns. Eventually Daniel opens his own dojo and has a group of students, including Robby, and his daughter, Samantha, who want to learn Miyagi-do karate. Daniel and Johnny’s students become rivals. For example, in one episode, Johnny and his students crash a promotion by Daniel’s students at a local carnival. The flow and relative gentleness of Miyagi-do martial arts is turned against the dojo by the driving rock ‘coolness’ of the Cobra Kai moves. These amusing antics provide entertainment and comic relief in the show.
At the end of season two, though, things take a much darker turn. The motto of Cobra Kai is “Strike First. Strike Hard. No Mercy.” We learn only later, in season three, that Johnny’s own teacher, John Kreese (played by Martin Kove), learned martial arts, including this motto, while serving on a special mission in the Vietnam War. His commander tried to instill in him the importance of not showing mercy to the enemy because it meant the difference between life and death. But it’s everyday life in 2019, not a special mission in the Vietnam War, and Johnny has begun to question this part of the motto for his dojo. He begins to teach his students that there is value in showing mercy. In the finale of the second season, called “No Mercy,” an epic fight breaks out at the high school where most of Johnny’s and Daniel’s students go to school. The fight is instigated by Tory Nichols (played by Peyton List). There was animosity between the Tory and Samantha throughout season two, but Tory became furious when she saw Samantha kissing her boyfriend, Miguel (whom Samantha briefly dated before that).
Soon after Tory sees Samantha and Miguel kiss, it’s the first day of school. Tory gets on the school intercom and tells Samantha that she is ‘coming to get her.’ Tory seeks out Samantha, and as she attacks her and Samantha defends herself, Miguel gets involved in the fight, believing Tory is being attacked. Robby, defending Samantha, blocks Miguel, and the two boys fight one another. They are fairly well matched, but a pivotal moment arrives where Miguel gets the upper hand, having pinned Robby on the ground. He could, with one twist, break Robby’s arm. In that moment, he remembers Johnny’s words that there is value in mercy. We see him hesitate while making his decision. Then he apologizes and lets Robby go. He has shown mercy, which is the “right” thing to do. Alas, seeing his opening, Robby leaps up with an angry cry. Still caught in the adrenaline of the fight, he attacks Miguel again. In a devastating moment, Miguel stumbles backwards from Robby’s attack, falling over the railing of the stairwell, and dropping to the landing below with a sickening crash.
Well, how’s that for a dilemma? In the first episodes of season three, we see Miguel in hospital, unconscious. He eventually wakes up from his coma, but he has been paralyzed by the fall. We also see Johnny desperate to come to grips with this tremendous tragedy. He taught his students to do what he thought was right, and yet doing the right thing ended up costing Miguel his ability to walk. What are we to make of this?
I have drawn this dilemma from Cobra Kai because, although it is fictional, it is nonetheless the sort of every day struggle that we see played out on the greater stage of “real” life all the time. One of the age-old questions people who believe in God have asked themselves is, “Why does God allow terrible things to happen to people?” In other words, how can Miguel, who is evidencing a quality that we might think of as godly, suffer such a terrible fate as a direct consequence? The answer, from the standpoint of ultimate oneness, is that God did not create the world and therefore has nothing to do with what happens in it. What A Course in Miracles teaches is that the world was made by the ego thought system. Anything of the ego is governed by scarcity and aggression, not by love and compassion. With luck, there is some love, some justice, and, yes, some mercy to be found in the world. But these things are not what make the world tick, and so trying to make sense of an event like Miguel’s injury from the perspective of a loving God is hard work indeed. By contrast, from the ego’s “kill or be killed” perspective, Robby shoving Miguel and causing him grievous harm makes all the sense in the world.
For those raised in a tradition of God as Creator of the world, the teaching that the ego made the world can be very jarring. God is conceived of as an unimaginably vast and glorious being, so we can understand the origin of a teaching that this divine Being created the universe. Since we are not generally taught about the One Mind that believes it separated from God, it doesn’t come naturally to believe that we made the universe as one Mind. We see ourselves as little separated beings, and quite puny ones at that in relation to the magnificence we see when we look up at the stars, for example. Because our perception gives us this information, we have been able to forget our true nature. In the midst of our confusion, it’s tempting to believe that we ourselves have been forgotten by God or that it doesn’t matter what we do here in the world because, ‘God doesn’t even know we are here.’ What can be helpful in returning meaning to our experience of living in the world is remembering that our minds contain the Voice for God. By cultivating a relationship with our Inner Guide, we gain clarity. God could never forget us because we are one with God. It’s we who have forgotten this, believing instead that we separated from God. As a consequence of this belief we experience ourselves separate bodies living in a world of form.
Although the world is not itself a loving place, there is enormous scope for experiencing both love and peace in our day to day lives. This requires training the mind to discern beyond perception. What A Course in Miracles invites us to do is to make a different set of commitments than the ones we have been taught or find familiar. Instead of being committed to a system of values that tells us what to do in a given situation, we are instead taught to lean on our Inner Guide as we navigate the events in our lives. This Guide, which I call, “the Holy Spirit,” knows literally everything, past, present, and future, for every single living thing. This is the same sort of omniscience Christians are taught about God, but instead of being outside of us, housed in an omnipotent being, this far-seeing wisdom is found in the quiet center of our individual minds.
When you have learned how to decide with God, all decisions become as easy and as right as breathing. There is no effort, and you will be led as gently as if you were being carried down a quiet path in summer. Only your own volition seems to make deciding hard. The Holy Spirit will not delay in answering your every question what to do. He knows. And he will tell you… (T-14.IV.6)
Achieving a level of trust in the Holy Spirit such that all decisions are “as easy and as right as breathing” is, of course, something that takes time and experience with the Holy Spirit. Such a level of trust itself indicates already having traveled well along the road to enlightenment. Yet, there is no reason to feel discouraged about wherever we find ourselves on this road. The Course teaches that time is for learning and that the world is effectively our classroom. It also teaches that there is no way to fail at this curriculum. At any moment, in any situation, we can listen to one of two teachers, the Holy Spirit or the ego. If we listen to the Holy Spirit, we arrive at our remembrance of never having left our Home in God all the sooner; if we listen to the ego, we take a detour. Detours offer their own learning opportunities. They just require us to spend more time in states that are not peaceful. Healing our minds of the belief in separation is done in collaboration with the Holy Spirit, but each one of us is the decision maker in our lives:
You must accept guidance from within. The guidance must be what you want, or it will be meaningless to you. That is why healing is a collaborative venture. I can tell you what to do, but you must collaborate by believing that I know what you should do. Only then will your mind choose to follow me. (T-8.IV.4)
What about the dilemma from Cobra Kai? If there isn’t an objectively “right” or “wrong” thing to do in any given situation, what are we to make of the story of Miguel, Johnny, and Robby? One general idea inspired by A Course in Miracles is that we never know what anything is for because we don’t have the “big picture.” Each person is on an enlightenment journey, and their path is beyond our ability to discern. The Cobra Kai writers have something in mind for the development of their characters. For Miguel, as devastating as his injury is, some learning comes out of it. He is challenged to find a way to go on with his life. As season three unfolds, we see that at first Miguel is angry at Johnny, but later he comes to forgive him. Forgiveness is powerful and important stuff on the enlightenment road. This seems like a good direction on that road, but we have no way of knowing for sure. For Johnny, first he goes into a ‘crisis of faith.’ He feels responsible for Miguel’s injury and loses his way for a while with alcohol. But he is able to rally and fight, first for his relationship with Miguel, and then for his dojo and his role as sensei (mentor and teacher). Making meaning of tragedy and finding a way forward in one’s life is powerful and important stuff on the enlightenment road. This seems like a good direction in terms of enlightenment, but we of course have no way to know if it is. As for Robby, at least as far as I have gotten in the show, it looks like he is taking a detour into thinking with the ego. He is very angry at both Johnny for abandoning him again and again, and at Daniel, who he sees as getting him into trouble by telling the authorities where to find him after the fight. In his anger, Robby seems to be making choices that seem poor. But we don’t know. None of us could possibly know what someone’s path is or where it is taking them. If we try to decide the meaning of someone’s life journey at any moment in time, we are probably thinking with our egos.
An enlightenment journey without a codebook for decision-making and behavior in particular circumstances can cause a great deal of doubt and anxiety. Such a path is, of course, not for everyone, because, after all, no particular path is for everyone. But if we find ourselves drawn to such a path, despite the ambiguities inherent in it, then we can keep in mind a few things. We don’t have to effort at changing ourselves or our values. We only have to be willing to look at situations again, knowing that the ego always speaks first. We can also remember that one indicator that we are listening to the Holy Spirit is that we let go of judgment. Another indicator is that we experience a sense of peace, no matter the outcome of a situation. Lastly, we can take to heart the words of Sonny Kapoor (played by Dev Patel) in the movie, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel:
“Everything will be all right in the end and if it’s not all right, then it’s not yet the end.”
Or, in different words from A Course in Miracles, no matter which spiritual path we are on:
Forget not once this journey is begun the end is certain. Doubt along the way will come and go and go to come again. Yet is the ending sure. No one can fail to do what God appointed him to do. When you forget, remember that you walk with Him and with His Word upon your heart. Who could despair when hope like this is his? (Clarification of Terms, Epilogue, paragraph 1).
The Karate Kid (1984) is a movie created by Robert Mark Kamen, directed by John G. Avildsen, and produced by Columbia Pictures.
Cobra Kai (2018-present) is a television show created by Josh Heald, Jon Hurwitz, and Haden Schlossberg and distributed by Sony Pictures Television.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) is a movie directed by John Madden, written by Ol Parker, and produced by Participant Media and Blueprint Pictures.
All quotes are from A Course in Miracles, copyright ©1992, 1999, 2007 by the Foundation for Inner Peace, 448 Ignacio Blvd., #306, Novato, CA 94949, www.acim.org and info@acim.org, used with permission.