Level Up

The 1970s TV show Kung Fu showed the main character Caine in two distinct settings. One was the Shaolin Monastary. The other was the Old West. As an aside, the Caine character in many stories is the one who is between two worlds, has two families, or whatever, like Greek Prometheus, because the character is Prometheus.

The Shaolin Monastary in the show is depicted as an ideal school. The teachers are perfectly wise. The curriculum trains the mind and body to the highest possible degree. The student graduates only when he's perfectly ready and has mastered of kung fu and self-control.

An interesting concept that's not explored in the show, at least that I remember, is a "false monastery". The fraudulent monastery is day-to-day life for almost everyone in their education, then their adult life in the corporate world or other institutions. People aren't trained to be independent, complete humans. They're trained to be part of a machine and feed it. The medical industry is a great, easy to understand example of this concept: don't lose weight, and stop eating slop poison food or get in shape; become a dependent of a substance they make like ozempic or whatever pill because then you can sit in an office chair and do corporate work all day a a few more years longer than you would if you were totally fat.

The local mountain bike trail is like a Shaolin Monastery of the woods. The teachers are physics and nature and other riders. The riders are a free-range version of the students in the show and speed is the kung fu. It's very satisfying to try to go faster and faster around that course and attain new levels of skill at bike handling. One of the aspects of the true art, and true temple that's interesting to think about is there's no end to the quest for skill and speed. The pursuit of it is the whole point.

The false monastery is all about ends that aren't even achievable by its students. A great example of that is the concept of "retirement". People want to quit working, but to do that, they have to consume all the prime years of their life on a corporate treadmill and end up as a spent husk who's minding a retirement account balance which represents a bunch of other dummies on other treadmills.