Tag Archives: zen martial arts

Zen and Martial Arts

The Zen of the Martial Arts

Good morning!
I’m going to go all zen on you today,
so check out now if you think philosophy is garbage.

It’s funny,
probably the best definition for philosophy I ever heard
came from Bill Cosby.
He was asking the question,
‘Why is there air.’
All the philosophy professors would ask this
and that would lead them into a discussion of the cosmos
and God,
and life and everything.
And he said it’s a dumb question,
Just ask any coach and they’ll tell you
‘Air is so we can fill up balls.’

With that bit of droll humor in mind,
zen is supposed to be very philosophical.
It isn’t,
but we’ll just let that sit for a while.

So when I was about 15 or 16
my brother comes home and he tells me a joke.
He asks:
‘What is the difference between a duck?’
I look at him blankly,
it makes. no sense,
I shake my head
and he says:

‘One leg is both the same.’

And he walks off laughing hysterically.
Idiot brother.
Probably doesn’t even know what a ball is for.

But here’s the funny thing.
When I think back over my life,
that 73 long years that went by in a snap,
I don’t remember the jokes I heard.
I must have heard THOUSANDS of jokes!
But none of them were worth remembering.
But that joke about the duck,
and one leg being both the same,
it is vivid,
seared into me.
and I can’t forget it.
So my brother’s joke has had incredible impact on my life.
Which makes it the greatest joke of all time.
At least for me.
And,
it has zen implications.

After all,
the most famous zen saying of all time
is probably
‘what is the sound of one hand clapping.’
Tell me that doesn’t make as much sense as:

‘what’s the difference between a duck?’

And,
let’s translate that zen ‘joke’ to the martial arts.

‘What is the difference between a martial artist?’
And there are two very distinct un-zenlike answers.
And the answers,
applied to life,
result in two types of people.

The first type of person is one who needs to be entertained.
The second type of person is one who doesn’t need to be entertained.

And what the heck does that mean?
A lot, thank you, and here we go…

People are either creators,
or they are created.

People either search out something to entertain them,
or they produce.

This isn’t an absolute,
of course.
It’s one of those scales like:

to the degree that one produces
to that degree he doesn’t need to be entertained.
And,
to the degree that one is entertained,
to that degree he doesn’t produce.

I look at kids today,
needing to be entertained by a brainless video game.
and I would be disgusted,
except I used to bury my head in a book.
I needed to be entertained.

Where this would have gone I don’t know,
because I discovered martial arts,
and,
as you all know,
the martial arts seriously warps personalities.

But,
instead of needing to be entertained,
to read the latest book,
to go to the latest movie,
to waste time chattering over the latest stupid joke,
I started working.

I worked out,
learning and doing forms,
repeating them endlessly,
looking for some odd concept called…’perfection.’
Could I turn the hand right,
could I snap the foot perfectly,
could I perceive the attack before it came.

It didn’t happen fast,
it was more like a slow cook,
but I stopped needing to be entertained.
I started creating.
Instead of reading books
I started writing books.
Instead of wanting to be absorbed by a movie,
I wanted to be absorbed by a form.
Instead of needing to be entertained,
I entertained myself…by producing.
I became a totally and utterly different human being.

What a weird metamorphoses.
Hopefully you now understand the point,
you see the zen of it all.
Don’t play,
work.
The end of life comes too fast
and you need to hurry to get everything done,
but you won’t get anything done
if you’re sitting around trying to be entertained.

And that’s the difference between a duck.

have a great work out!
Al

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BTW
I’m always pushing my novels,
did you know I write other stuff?
If you want to know the truth about government,
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why the government seems to do the exact wrong thing
almost ALL the time…
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The Emptiness within the Original Style of Karate

Newsletter 893

The Original Karate

Thanks, guys,
Both the ten book series
‘The Biggest Martial Arts Lesson of All,’
and
Professional Martial Arts Instructor,’
are selling.
Thanks.

Okay,
had a real interesting email the other day,
BW had some interesting observations and expeeriences,
regarding heat in the body,
chi circulation,
and so on.
So here is the skinny on all this…

Chinese martial arts have been around a long time.
And,
they have evolved into Tai Chi,
among other internal forms.
All of which says…martial arts evolve.

When they begin,
they frequently use muscle.
Nothing wrong with that.
Except energy is more efficient,
much stronger.

Ever have a baby clutch your finger?
Won’t let go?
Their ‘strength’ is all out of proportion
to their size and development.
They haven’t developed muscles,
so they use energy,
which needs no development to use.

Before you go crazy on that last statement,
let me make a point:
when we learn muscles (as we grow)
we give up energy.
We simply lose that intuitive ‘chi strength’
that we are born with,
or at least know before we get muscles.
Then,
if we want energy,
we have to learn it all over again.
And this means attaining the understanding that a baby has.
What understanding does a baby have?
He understands how to relax.
Energy,
of course,
flows better through what is relaxed.
Which brings us around
to the idea of Tai Chi.
Learn to relax.

Now,
BW was more concerned with experiencing heat in the body.
Karate was giving him much heat.
Here’s the difference…
Tai Chi is slow,
it is ‘suspended’ energy.
You suspend your body in space,
and that takes a very slow drool of energy
which I call ‘suspended energy.’

Karate explodes.
Both types of energy,
suspended and explosive
create heat.
But Karate creates it faster.

Although,
if you wish,
you can dedicate your TCC to the production of heat,
and your body can get amazingly hot.

Okay,
we have two points here,
relaxing and creating heat/energy.
Let me get to the point.

When Karate came from China
it was taught with an eye to chi power.
People relaxed more in the form,
figured out how to make the tricks work effortlessly.
Then, as the martial arts grew,
people and schools lost that ability.
The Japanese in particular
were obsessed with power,
and that often meant muscular power,
and not chi power.
And example of this is actually given,
though inadvertently,
in the book ‘Moving Zen,’
by CW Nicol.
Mr. Nicol relates the story of a TCC man
who was pounding on a pillar under a huge house.
The house shook,
the karate men couldn’t make it shake with their punches,
and there is a conclusion in there.
But you have to have an open mind to make it.

Anyway,
speaking for myself,
How do I know that what I tell you here is true?
Because I learned a style of Karate called Kang Duk Won.
And it was only a couple of generations removed from China.
Byung In Joon to a couple of Koreans to Bob Babich to me.
Not a long time for it to get corrupted.
Mr. Babich, in particular,
was incredibly light and whippy.
He was like a father that weighed a thousand pounds.
The other people in our school used muscle,
and were in awe of Bob.
I watched Bob,
and tried to figure out what he was doing that was different.
I probably wouldn’t have figured it out,
except that I read a lot of books on zen.
And the secret was:

emptiness.

Space.

Doing nothing until nothing is left undone.

To relax,
even in the middle of form,
even in the middle of technique,
even in the middle of freestyle.

And,
when you relax…
chi flows.
And Chi can create,
among other things…
heat.

Now,
the final thing I want to say,
give you a chance to grok all this,
has to do with being ‘on,’ or ‘off.’

BW observed the difference between his art
when it worked light and whippy,
and…other times.

When you relax your body totally,
when you make ONLY the fist tight,
then you will get a result snap that is incredible,
and different from the art
that all the power mongers out there
want to sell.

But it takes patience,
no resistance,
an emptiness of the mind.

It’s easy to do,
but so easy it’s hard.

Seems like there is always something there to distract you.

Okley dokely.
Nuff said,
I wish you success.
You can check out the Kang Duk Won in my book of the same name,
it’s on Amazon.
Or at the KangDukWon.com site.
Or you can check out what I’ve done with some of the forms here…

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/temple-karate/

Temple Karate has an amazing amount of material on it,
including some data on how the art was really formed,
and what for,
and how it was really meant to be used.

So have a great work out!

Al

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/temple-karate/

http://www.amazon.com/Binary-Matrixing-Martial-Arts-Case/dp/1515149501/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1437625109&sr=8-1&keywords=binary+matrixing

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Making the Zen Mind in the Martial Arts

A Silent Mind and Monkeyland…

Good morning
and a GREAT work out to you!

Is it better to feel up or down?
up, right?
And a work out causes you to go up,
to feel better,
so,
I repeat…
a GREAT workout to you!

Now,
the big news is Monkeyland.
I’ll talk about it in a minute,
but first,
I wanted to share a thought
on what happens to your mind when you matrix.

First,
there is relief.
All the jumbled up techniques suddenly fit together.
You can see the blank spaces, where techniques were missing,
you stop hesitating and intuition starts to kick in.
Simply,
the techniques you have been memorizing suddenly make sense,
and become accessible without thought.

This thing of doing without thinking is incredibly interesting.
A baseball player takes off at the crack of the bat.
He’s all the way out in centerfield,
how did he know how to run at the crack of the bat?
He hasn’t had time to study the trajectory of the ball,
yet…he knows where the ball is going.
That is a zen moment.
That is a moment of intuition.
And the question here,
really,
is how do we make our entire lives into a zen moment?
Why do we have to leave the zen moment and return
to the old knock on wood world?
Why do we have to go back to thinking?

This is the purpose of the martial arts,
this is what they are all about,
to take us out of the reaction time, apple falls on head world,
and to put us in a zen universe,
a world where our every action is instant and intuitive.

Now,
as I said,
when you matrix the martial arts you feel relief,
the more martial arts you know,
the greater the feeling of relief,
but the real cool stuff starts happening when your mind starts getting silent.

After you matrix your mind will relax and you will start to experience mental silence.

When you walk down the street
your mind is usually filled with junk.
Thoughts about what you’re going to do,
does he or she like me,
contemplations on work,
and all sorts of other things.
Simply,
you are thinking ALL the time.
The mind just won’t stop…
it just won’t shut up.

After you matrix you feel relief,
but something else has started,
your mind has started to calm down.
It is talking because it is confused,
is one way to look at it.
But,
any way you look at it,
calmed down,
the mind starts to go neutronic.
It starts to shut up,
and you start to look at the world
without having all this thinking crap going on in your mind.

It is a blessed silence.

So here are some things to think about
to help you come to grips with this silence,
and to make it happen quicker.
Mind you,
the things I say will work for martial arts that are not matrixed,
but they will take twenty or thirty years to happen.
With matrixed minds,
everything happens faster.
Logic always works faster.

First,
have you ever engrossed yourself in a good book?
You put it down and suddenly wonder where the time went.
Your mind wasn’t thinking,
because it was busy generating a world
out of the words you read.

when you do a form,
you want to get that feeling,
of investing yourself in the form,
of creating emotion and movement so intently,
that you stop thinking.

Simply,
you are so busy concentrating on one thing,
that you forget about the world.

Try standing and holding your arm out
with the index finger raised.
Stare at that finger.
Every time your thoughts start to wander,
every time you lose focus and start to think,
examine the finger.
Look at the sworls, the curves, the nail…
examine it,
lose yourself in examining your finger.

The point here is simply to learn how to focus your attention
so that your mind doesn’t generate a bunch of crap.
This is a simple exercise in how to remain focused and attentive,
but on what you want…
not on what your mind wants.

Guaranteed,
after a while you will experience the blessed silence.
You will be face to face with the world,
with no bushwah thoughts getting between you and the world.
It is a very special place,
it is a very zen place.

And it will happen faster if you matrix.

Here’s the first course…
http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/matrix-karate/

You do Matrix Karate,
you learn Karate if you don’t know it,
or you finally understand Karate if you have already been studying it.
Now,
take whatever art you wish,
plug it into the matrix.

Take the high block in your rare and esoteric system of Golden Fu,
put it where the Matrix high block is.
Do the same for all the blocks.
Put your blocks into the Matrix forms, high for high, low for low, and so on.
Do the Matrix of blocks,
plugging your blocks into the thing.

Zingo bingo,
your art is matrixed.
You still have a complete classic art of your own,
but it suddenly becomes understandable.
Techniques that were hidden pop out at you.
Gaps in training routines become visible,
and you can fix them!

And your mind will start to become silence,
and you will finally see the world
that the chattering of your mind
has stopped you from seeing.

Oinkey donkey,
Monkeyland.

I’ve got a complete list of things to research…
garden boxes,
how to keep animals out of the garden boxes,
morphing them into green houses,
green houses into meditation rooms.
Interesting stuff,
with an overall aesthetic to it all.
A plan.

And, the thing I’m working on this week…how much is chicken feed?
How do I generate food for chickens without paying out money?
Because everything has to eventually be self sufficient.
Everything has to go natural as soon as possible.

And,
I’ll be honest,
I’ve never done anything like this before,
so I am confused and dazed and…quite enthralled.

But,
the real plans are in the martial arts programs.
I’m figuring out plans for seekers (postulants), novices (novitiates), monks, and so on.
How much art do I give for each level,
how do I tie it in with neutronics, and so on.

And,
Monster has to stay afloat,
because there are going to be people who are more interested in martial arts
and don’t want any religious bushwah infringing upon them.
I understand and empathize.
They are the recruits from which I will draw
after they have had some matrixing,
and have realized that they can make the world into a zen universe.

So in addition to terracing the hilltops,
making work out places for every art,
I think about things like libraries,
and living quarters,
and everything.
And I am really concerned about making a curriculum
that really works.

Now,
that said,
as you might expect,
price of courses will be rising.
Heck,
you all know I’ve been too low for too long,
and I’ve got a temple to build,
unless,
of course,
some happy millionaire out there
wants to donate a million bucks.
That would certainly help out.

Anyway,
you’ve got about a week,
then I’ve got to raise the prices,
so take advantage while you can.
And you might consider starting with Matrix Karate.
It’ll be the first course for Postulants (seekers),
and people will be expected to know it before they even get invited to Monkeyland.
Here’s that URL again…

http://monstermartialarts.com/martial-arts/matrix-karate/

Now,
I’ve spoken enough,
got to get to work,
got to make this thing happen.
And I thank everyone who sent in their well wishings and congrats to me.
I appreciate all of your thoughts
and will try to live up to them.
Thanks,
and have a great work out!

Al