The Modern Art of War Ch.9: Contemplative-Awareness Expansion - Growing Your Inner Calm
So far in this series, Sun Tzu has been training us to watch our thoughts, interrupt patterns, and vary our responses. All of that was preparation.
Chapter 9 is where things expand. Literally.
This is “Contemplative-Awareness Expansion,” and it’s about what happens when you start going deeper into your own mind. The good stuff. But also the tricky stuff, because the deeper you go, the more your old patterns fight back.
Four Tactics for Centering Your Mind
Sun Tzu doesn’t waste time. He immediately gives us four methods for keeping our awareness centered on what the book calls the “Inner Sun,” that calm, bright center point inside you:
Elevating awareness - Bring your attention to the highest level of consciousness. Aim up, toward clarity, toward light. Don’t linger at the level of daily worries.
Anchoring awareness - Once you’re elevated, anchor there. Don’t let your attention slide back toward the senses, the noise, the drama. Stay rooted in that higher space.
Relaxing awareness - When difficult perceptions show up (and they will), don’t fight them. Gently relax into a state of effortless allowing. Let them pass like clouds.
Unrestricting awareness - When your mind is clear and settled, take a position at that higher level. From there, you have an unobstructed view. New thoughts arise, and you can see them coming from a distance.
These four tactics, elevating, anchoring, relaxing, unrestricting, are your toolkit for this stage. They work together. You aim higher, hold your position, stay loose when things get rough, and open up when the field is clear.
The Five Interruptions
But here’s the thing. Your mind does not want to stay in that peaceful place. Not at first. Sun Tzu identifies five types of interruptions that will pull you back into ordinary, distracted thinking:
- Interruptions from the physical body. Pain, discomfort, restlessness. Your body will demand attention.
- Interruptions from sensations and feelings. Emotions rising up out of nowhere, stealing your focus like clouds passing across a clear sky.
- Interruptions from thoughts and ideas. The classic mental chatter. Plans, worries, random memories. They keep you stuck in a confined mental space.
- Interruptions from shifting perceptions. Your view of things changes suddenly, like getting tangled in a thicket. You were calm, now you’re confused.
- Interruptions from being aware of the interruptions. This is the sneaky one. You notice you’re being interrupted, and that awareness itself becomes another distraction. Like falling into a mental swamp.
Sun Tzu’s advice? Withdraw attention with speed. Don’t engage. Let these interruptions arise and fall away on their own.
The image I keep coming back to is driving on a highway. If you stop for every little event on the side of the road, every billboard, every random sight, you’ll never get anywhere. The goal is to keep moving. Notice things, sure. But don’t pull over for every one of them.
The Gentle Way
There’s a word that keeps showing up in this chapter: gentle.
Gentle discipline. Gentle care. Gentle hands. Liguore really stresses this point. If you try to force your mind into stillness, if you scold yourself for getting distracted, if you treat meditation like some kind of punishment, it doesn’t work. It actually makes things worse.
Sun Tzu says it directly: “The more you balance the mind with harmony, the more the disruptions will settle. Restrict or try to control them and they will only take root more.”
So no aggressive self-discipline. No beating yourself up for wandering attention. That’s not intelligence, Liguore says. That’s just another form of force, and force creates resistance.
Instead, think of tending to your awareness the way you’d care for a very young child or a very old person. Every gesture matters. Every thought you direct at yourself leaves an impression. Be kind with it.
The Natural State of Your Mind
Here’s something that might surprise you. According to Sun Tzu (through Liguore’s interpretation), the natural state of your mind isn’t chaos. It’s quiet serenity.
All the mental noise, the worry loops, the rumination, the anxiety? That’s the disruption. Calm is the default. We’re just covered in layers of habits, reactions, and old patterns that make it hard to see that.
When you start peeling those layers back through gentle practice, you start returning to what was always there. The book describes it as “changeless.” Not that nothing moves, things are always in motion. But the motion is effortless. Like a wheel that’s spinning smoothly, without friction or noise.
And here’s the beautiful part. When you get to that place, even for a few seconds, your relationship to everything shifts. You experience the world as ordered, united, harmonious. And you naturally want to stay there. You don’t want to create noise or discord. You just want to participate in the flow.
How We Hurt Ourselves Without Realizing It
Liguore includes a section in this chapter that’s worth sitting with.
We don’t see how much harm we do to ourselves through our own thinking. We forecast terrible futures. We deny ourselves our own dreams based on scarcity thinking. We put ourselves last while believing we’re acting in our own interest.
And then we blame other people for our problems.
But Sun Tzu says: look at who’s actually talking. The Observer, your own mind, is creating scenarios that bring you into battle with your surroundings. It’s rarely other people doing anything to you. It’s your unregulated mind forming the conflict.
Liguore uses a great example. Imagine it’s midnight. Hard knocking on your door. Aggressive, loud. You lie in bed, wondering who it is. And your mind fills in the blank based on your history, your fears, your sense of the world. A scared person imagines a threat. An animal rescuer imagines someone with a lost pet.
The knock is neutral. Your mind assigns it meaning. And whatever meaning you give it, that’s the experience you live.
Even if you never open the door, you can spend the next hour agitated. And carry the story to work the next day. “You won’t believe what happened last night!” All from a knock you never investigated.
Never Give Up
The chapter ends with a straightforward message: never give up. Victory comes to those who make the effort, even when it feels like they’re not getting anywhere.
If you think you’ve mastered a distraction and then it comes back stronger, that’s not failure. That’s the cycle. Thoughts come in waves. Some waves are bigger than others. The practice is to keep returning to center, every time, with gentle discipline.
And over time, something shifts. You start trusting yourself. Your inner teacher becomes your companion. You’re not being selfish by caring for your own mind. You’re actually becoming someone who gives more to the world, because you’re no longer creating disorder from the inside out.
The Ninth Step
Here’s what to take away from Chapter 9:
- Use the four centering tactics. Elevate, anchor, relax, unrestrict. Practice them in daily life, not just in formal meditation.
- Know the Five Interruptions. Body, sensations, thoughts, shifting perceptions, and awareness of the interruptions themselves. Expect them. Don’t be surprised.
- Be gentle with yourself. Force creates resistance. Gentleness creates progress. This is not optional advice, it’s the core method.
- Trust that calm is your natural state. You’re not building something new. You’re uncovering what was always there.
Contemplative-Awareness Expansion is the ninth step on the Hidden Path to Peace and Wholeness. And the promise is real: soon, your Inner Sun will be a natural place for you to rest. Whether your eyes are open, closed, or you’re asleep.
Let deep contemplation be your new gentle discipline.
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