Newsletter 971
Under the Martial Arts
There are people who do the martial arts,
and there are people who wander around
on the surface of the martial arts
and never get to the real depths.
Now look,
fighting is good.
It’s got to happen.
It’s martial,
right?
But what is under that?
What is under the fighting?
Fighting is when two people communicate.
Yeah.
It’s a form of communication.
The communication is pretty basic.
‘I hate you!’
I want to kill you!’
That sort of thing.
So let me ask you,
what do you feel when you fight in the martial arts?
And,
what should you feel?
When you are doing freestyle with friends
it’s all pretty light.
It’s a game of tag.
No escalation,
but the potential is there.
And you are practicing for that potential,
for when you need it.
Except…
Yeah, that exception thing,
it’s right under everything,
nobody gets it much,
but it’s there,
and here it is.
If an insane man comes at you on the street,
wants to kill you,
should you feel hate?
Anger?
Rage?
If you do then you are lowering yourself to his level,
you are just as insane as him.
Even in the middle of a fight for life.
What you should feel is joy.
Somebody is talking to you,
and they mean what they say.
Doesn’t matter if you like what they say,
what matters is that they think enough of you
to communicate such important things to you.
And,
he is giving you a gift.
That fist,
that foot,
that knife,
is the solid part of the communication,
and it is a gift.
He is allowing you to work your technique.
He is giving you a chance to present your art,
to manifest your soul.
So let me ask you,
should your soul reflect hate?
Or should you be grateful that another human being
loves you enough to communicate his deepest desires to you?
This idea,
that a punch is a communication
and an expression of love
is underneath the martial arts.
And you should practice the martial arts
not to feel hate,
or some other emotion,
but to express love.
Except…
uh oh,
one more of those exceptional things…
when you do the martial arts
you shouldn’t feel love nor hate.
Love is a contract to express affection no matter what.
Hate is an out of control emotion,
signifying that the human has stopped thinking.
The best way to understand this is this:
there is no such thing as good,
there is no such thing as evil,
those are terms we made up
to describe things we like or don’t like.
They don’t exist,
except as concepts to describe what we are feeling.
The same thing holds true for love and hate,
love is a contract for affection,
hate is an emotion we use to attack someone.
You are going towards or way,
and to be totally efficient in the martial arts,
you put aside love and hate,
not wasting energy on such emotional expressions,
and focus only on what you are doing.
Have you ever read a book
and lost track of the time?
Or even seen a movie,
and gotten so engrossed
you were unaware of the passage of time?
That is what you should be doing in the martial arts,
that is the martial art underneath
fighting and hate and love
and all that sort of distraction.
When you fight it should be as if
you are in a tunnel,
and the reduction of the situation
is at the other end of the tunnel.
Hopefully it won’t include
the reduction and destruction
of the other person.
Oddly,
I didn’t learn this through freestyle,
I learned this,
became able to enter the tunnel,
and divest myself of distractive emotions
and concepts and such
by doing the forms.
I learned to focus and concentrate by doing the forms.
And that’s what is underneath the martial arts,
and it is easy to get to
if you just focus,
concentrate,
and dedicate yourself
to a higher existence.
Of course,
it is much easier to get there
if you have eliminated distractions from your art,
gotten rid of impure techniques,
unwanted motion and such,
by matrixing your art.
Here’s the obligatory ad;
it is one of the advanced drills I use
for teaching people how to fight without distractions,
emotions, and that sort of thing.
Have a tremendous work out!
Al
A WIN!
Freestyle: I have had awful instructors who do and promote a gladiator freestyle event on a weekly basis. I hated it and never came back. What really ticked me off was that it was a TKD class. I felt like he was selling TKD as a viable street defense and I did not agree. As a brown belt in jiu jitsu I would have no problem shooting a single or double leg take down on an advanced TKD practitioner and did so repeatedly but the sparring was only stand up and people were just pounding each other. When that occurs they regressed to gross motor skills and swung and kicked wildly. That being said, your method allows the student to slowly build the skill, grown the fine motor control, and get used to the time dilation that occurs when sparring or fighting. As a person that’s deployed several times I work well in high stress environments but that took years to develop. I think your method is a scientific, controlled, and best of all repeatable manner in which to inoculate a student to stressors. ~ Paul v H.
“If you don’t want to slip up tomorrow, speak the truth today.”
– Bruce Lee
