Lessons from My Masters 31: The Grandmaster Chronicles - Part III

“The soul never thinks without a mental picture.” 
                       ― Aristotle

So… in my last installment, I discussed a number of things whereas a result I received a lot of questions and feedback. All good stuff so thanks for the interest. In this Blog Post, I want to cover some other things I learned from my master but most important of all try to explain some of the things that I’m often asked about. I’ll also begin to describe some concepts that while I’ve spoken of in the past I’ve never really delved into because they are difficult to describe on paper so to speak. Understand that these things that I’m telling you are concepts and are not a panacea for the whole art they are just as I like to say to students, “a thing”. Meaning "don’t fall in love with the technique".

Anyway, I received some questions from folks both in and out of class on the concept that as I described in my last Blog Post how when Grandmaster Perkins is moving, there are things that he is doing that are outside of “conscious awareness” meaning you’re not consciously aware that you’re doing them. Or what he called and I like this term, “malleable” things. Because that’s what it is he’s describing, this type of “movement within movement”, controlling the space between the space, between point A and B in the body. That’s why it’s hard to deal with once it gets going because it happens too fast.

I know some folks were confused on this but I meant what I said there are things he does that are not possible to know when he’s doing it. Because there are ways in which we all do things that are outside of our ability to be consciously aware of them at the time when we are doing them. So, I explained it to one student who asked me about this just the other day, like this,

“You know I use to coach football, and I can tell you I can teach you how to throw a football the right way. I can teach you how to hold the ball correctly, where to place your index finger, how to rotate your shoulders and hips, how to step off the right foot and follow through on the release. I can show you all that stuff. But you know what? The one thing I can’t teach you is how to develop your ‘touch’ on the ball when you throw it. I can tell if you’re throwing the ball too hard or if you’re not putting enough zip on the ball or that for certain plays you need to put more air under the ball for the receivers to run underneath it. I can tell you all that stuff because I can see it for myself and I’ve thrown enough footballs to know within reason what the problem is. But beyond that how you actually throw a football? What your body is actually doing when you throw? How did you know just the right about of force to put on the ball? You have to throw a lot of footballs, I mean in the tens of thousands to develop that, and that’s why most people can’t play quarterback no matter how gifted in the NFL because you have to develop what we call having a touch on the ball.”

I continued,

“When you throw a football, baseball or a punch. Sure, you can tell me the ten or twenty things you’re aware of you are doing because you know how to throw a baseball, a punch or whatever, but what you can’t tell me is why did your hips and shoulders turn as far or as little as they did? Why did you step exactly the way you did when you did and how did you actually do it in the body? How did you just ‘know’ how to do that? Here let me show you something. Touch my chest.”

So the student touches my chest,

“Now do it again.”

So he does it again. I said,

 “Okay, now I want you to push me on the same spot where you touched me with some force.”

So when he did it I went backward a little. So I said,

“Okay now do it and only use enough force to break my balance.”

So, when he went to push me this time I tried to move as he was pushing me and he was still able to break my balance. So then I said (oh, you know where this is going),

“Okay, now I asked you to do three different things and each time you were able to do them but there’s something else. If you noticed the last time when I told you to just break my balance, I tried to cheat a little by moving my body and trying to pocket and turn as your hand touched me and you still were able to break my balance even though I tried to cheat. You with me so far?”

He’s like yeah…

So I said,

“So, how did you know when you did those things how to use the right amount of force, the right amount of touch to do them? How did your body know how to accommodate what you did when you did it? Don’t tell me what you did, tell me exactly what your body was doing, tell me how your body knew what to do, how it knew even when I cheated how to reposition itself so your hand could still push me anyway?”

At this point, he’s looking at me speechless and I can tell that the earth just shifted underneath his feet. So I told him, “That’s right you don’t know…” he then opened his mouth and tried to answer and I said,

“No! You don’t know! You don’t know, you don’t know, and let me tell you something else, you-do-not-know! And you know why you don’t know? Because it’s not possible to know”.

I then explained something like,

“All of the movements, all of the subtle adjustments, the turns, the counter movements from one limb to another, the subtle shifting all with the right timing, at the right moment in time and space, etc. the ‘touch’. When we move the way we move for whatever reason there are for all we know a million different adjustments our bodies make to accomplish what we want to accomplish. And, as we train there are going on in-the- body, outside of our conscious awareness perhaps millions of micro-iterations within our movement that we have learned taking place that are training the body to do the thing we want it to do at the moment we want it to do it. And that’s what you want. So while you have to think about the thing you want to practice, moving smoothly or whatever, you don’t want to overthink it because you’ll start interfering in the way your body has learned everything from using a hammer to driving a car. You don't want to interfere with that process that I just described as to how your body develops the ability to just do things.”

"Whatever you do in life, if you want to be creative and intelligent, and develop your brain, you must do everything with the awareness that everything, in some way, connects to everything else."

                       --Leonardo da Vinci

Speaking of driving a car one of the other analogies I use to get people to understand this it this especially as it relates to “tool replacement” and just go along with me here. When you’re driving your car, what are your hands doing? I mean you know they’re on the steering wheel, but you don’t know. I mean all you know if you’re not hitting shit you must be doing something right but in truth, you don’t know. Because with all of the micro adjustments and adjustments within adjustments to include sometimes like when you make a tight turn where if you take it too fast and your body has to “lean with the turn” so you don’t lose control of the car. How do you do that? How do you know you even have to lean? Because your body can feel what's going on.

You know because you’ve learned through experience until it reached a level of unconscious competence where you “just know” or “know without knowing”.  And to me in all of this stuff that we do for fighting, that’s the fucking point! Trying to figure out how to move on a base level or strike while in the fight is not the time to learn those things, you have to build it up beforehand.

This is why when John tells people to work on a certain technique or do Contact Flow in a certain manner I always tell people, “Stop fucking My Master's drills and exercises up”. Just do the thing he told you to do because if you don’t and you “overthink it” you get in the way of this process of how our body figures out how to do the thing you want to do. How your body learns how to refine the movements, become “smooth”, “graceful” where everything you do becomes almost “effortless”. Just focus on that one thing to the best of your ability and let your body “learn”.

There’s a word for this but I don’t think some folks truly understand it, it’s called “training”. But there’s a catch, you see just as you can be trained in the right things you can also train yourself to do the wrong things, (as I’ve seen) for training is agnostic, it’s just a process but you can screw yourself up if you do it wrong so you want to focus on “proper training” to develop as Tim use to call it “purposeful habits”.  As Aristotle said, “we are what we repeatedly do…” obviously more to it than that but you get the point.  Like I was telling one of our instructors from Kansas City, Brent Ames, the other day when he was visiting us in NY, if you want to as I like to say, "Kick that Ass" you've got to work at this stuff and pay the price. Right Brent? ;-)

Back to the Future Part II

“It’s not so much that I’m getting out of phase as it is I’m in another dimension so to speak…”

              --Grandmaster John Perkins

While John was speaking figuratively I know what he meant. It wasn’t that he was just "faking people out" as he’s often referred to it, he’s just not there. A while back I wrote a Blog Post on “Fighting in the Future” and I promised that at some point I would return to this. But before I go on I need to point some stuff out. Now to me, this is a brilliant concept that John has developed. The whole idea of moving in a way where he gets ahead of another person’s movement and there are various ways this is done to include what he calls once again the idea of “faking people out” but the point is. It is the way one person is able all things being equal of course, to gain an advantage over another person within the same relative time and space.

So let me offer this, having been a former Operations Officer and Intelligence Officer in the Marine Corps, I’ve held some of the highest clearances you can hold and I can tell you the US military spends tens of billions of dollars on SRI (surveillance, reconnaissance, intelligence) capabilities. And while very impressive as I've seen at the end of the day it’s all to do one thing… to get the drop on the bad guys. So in a nutshell, to get ahead of their movement, to get to the future position on them.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.”

                  --Aldous Huxley

Now I’m going to tell you this concept as John has developed it, while brilliant, (and it really is light years ahead of where other people are). For many people in the martial arts and even many within Guided Chaos believe it or not, as far as they’re concerned it's all bullshit. A big part of it is they don’t understand it so they can’t see it with their minds, and if they can’t see it with their minds as far as they’re concerned it doesn’t really exist.

The other part is aside from moving faster than another person they really don’t know how to do it so once again instead of trying to learn if it’s even possible they push it to the too hard to do category or chock it up as some mystical thing that only exists in class under controlled conditions, or can be done by a few physically gifted folks. Oh, how wrong they are. In truth, it’s at least from my experience is much easier to pull this stuff off at full speed but also much more dangerous… for them.

Several years ago I was in England doing a seminar and I explained this to one of the participants and then I demonstrated it on him.  Mind you this is a guy with lots of serious martial arts full contact tournament fighting under his belt and as I once told this story in a previous Blog Post he was also an astrophysicist.  After explaining and demonstrating it for him and of course letting him “test it out” (i.e., do whatever you want), when I was done all he said was, “Of course you couldn’t have done it any other way, I mean I understand I just can’t do it”.

Oh, he got it.

Now, as I said in a previous post on this if you think you know more about how time and space works than an astrophysicist who use to work on guidance systems for the US Department of Defense, well… I don’t know what to tell you except that you’re a “special kind of fool”.

How The Universe Works - Part 6,083

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

                  --Marcus Aurelius

Like I said there’s the way the universe works and then there’s what’s in your head and the two are not always the same, so if you ever desire to learn these things your head needs to get right with the universe. This concept like I said is brilliant beyond measure and explains a lot of the “anomalies” as I like to call them or the “other stuff” as to how John moves. It’s not everything mind you but it gives you a better understanding as to the fact that these things do exist. Now it’s not like it’s some formal thing or technique but the concept is “very real”. Of that, there should be no ambiguity in your mind.

“Be extremely subtle even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate.”

                       ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

John you see has the unique ability to move in a way where from the very start it alters your perception of time so it makes it extremely difficult to track his movement. The other thing you don’t know is when he’s moving like this is whether or not he’s leading you to the place he wants you to be (oh yeah… this is wild). I was once talking with someone and they were commenting on a video of John demonstrating a concept to someone and they described how the person trapped John’s arm and John just got out of it. So I said,

“What? That’s not what happened, I know it was hard to hear because of the wind in the video but you can hear John describe how he adjusts his body to not allow himself to get caught up. You see this guy didn’t trap John’s arm, John put him there.”

At this point, I got some strange looks so I explained,

“Listen, if you listen to John carefully he not only put the guy in that seemly dominant position but when he asked what the guy would do, John just relaxed and chopped the guy in the shoulder. He was trying to describe how through developing proper looseness how he is never trapped. Again, he (John) put him there it’s that simple.”

Granted it’s not as simple as I’m making it sound but that’s pretty much what happened in a nutshell.

Later on in probably another Blog Post when I talk about “Stopping Time”, “Slowing Time”, or “Disappearing” I’ll discuss some of this “other stuff” in a little more detail but since I brought it up as a definition:

Stopping Time – is a way of moving where for a brief moment all movement in your body “stops” for like a microsecond, to change the tempo either to get them to overcommit or in anticipation of them over committing so you can affect their body as they try to adjust. (I was just telling this story recently in a class where John did this to me once from about ten feet away from where I literally almost stumbled over my own feet trying to adjust.  Got so mad at myself I cursed out loud. Too funny.)

Slowing Time – is a way of moving where for brief moments, like a microsecond, you actually “slow down” your movement to change the tempo either to get them to overcommit or to direct them to where you want them to go. (I saw John do this one time where without touching the person he literally almost made them fall over backward. I barely saw what he did and in truth, I fully don’t know what he did but it was amazing to the point where it was comical.)

Disappearing – is a way of moving where you can literally “lift” your hands, arms or even move your body away from them where for a microsecond, they actually get stuck where they are because they are still holding the shape of your last “impression”. (Okay folks, this is a way cool skill to develop because when moving at speed I’ve literally made people almost face plant when doing this to them. This, by the way, is what John did to me that time he while touching me with his body somehow got behind me even though we were in direct contact. As I said, too funny.)

Now, these are not formal things these are just names I just gave these things to describe things that I’ve felt not only John do on me but things he showed me under The Wisdom Tree when I would ask him how he did certain things. Usually, when I would ask him what he did he would just laugh and say, “Oh, you like that?”

Too funny…

All of these things I’ve described above fall under the rubric as I've said of what John simply calls “Faking people out”. However, when he’s saying “That’s all I’m doing”, “That’s all it is…”

In truth, it really is that on a macro level, and that’s because of all of the other processes (on a micro and perhaps nano level)  he’s doing in the body through over 6 decades of combative movement.  He’s developed his body, along with God-given talent, (because John really is an exceptionally talented person even if he doesn’t think so), in a way where when moving all of those processes and movements outside of our conscious awareness just happen, he just knows the right thing to do.

Then there’s “Creativity” but that’s another discussion for another Blog Post.

But The Future Can Only Be Appreciated By Looking Back

"When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come."

                       --Leonardo da Vinci

It’s really sad how I see so many people including Guided Chaos folks close their minds off but like I said in my last post it’s not my job to convince people of the truth. They see these things right in front of them and at times feel them for themselves in the flesh so to speak. Yet they disbelieve it. Their hand is, "...in a flowing stream," so they, "...touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come", and yet still do not appreciate it.  John tells them what he’s doing yet they chase the shiny object, he shows them what his body did and even says it, but they want to know what that thing was he did with his hand. He shows how he becomes unavailable but they do not focus on what his body is doing as he is saying it so the lesson is lost on them. As Tim used to tell me all the time, “Watch what John did there, did you see that? Watch that did you see it?” The word was watch, watch, watch… and so I did… and still, do to this day.

When John moves even when teaching you he’s already in the future, this ability is what allows him to guide your body to all the right conclusions. It's simple if he doesn't see it first he can't help you nor recognize when you are doing the right thing. But as always there’s more…

You see part of the problem is when you get to the future you are no longer looking at just the future but staring back at the past of where you were and where they are. When practicing Guided Chaos or whatever we all get to the future on the other person from time to time and whether it’s speed, reach, becoming unavailable as you enter, or your ability through the principles, etc. Those who are better at it are able to get there on a more consistent basis. But here’s the deal. The reason why for some folks this concept of Fighting in the Future is so hard to grasp is that when you get to the future on another person, whatever you’re going to do, “it already happened”.

"As a rule, what is out of sight disturbs men's minds more seriously than what they see."

                          --Julius Caesar

This is one of the main reason when doing Contact Flow why people unnecessarily speed up. It’s because they feel this “distortion” in time where all of a sudden they’re behind the curve and so they speed up because it’s the only way they feel they can get back into the fight. They also speed up because their minds can't get around the idea that because you got ahead of them that slice of time and space from their perepsctive "disappeared" from their awareness. It literally feels like you teleported to a new position on them. Again, this is because the movement of the other person “feels” from their perspective as if they were moving faster even though the opposite is usually the case. The other thing is when I say it already happened, I’m not just talking about something that is visual but something that happens in the body, meaning all of the adjustments, all of the adumbration, the “pre-movement” needed already happened in the body of the person who got to the future ahead of you. This of it like this, if you've ever played baseball when you're at bat you position your body where you're already prepared to hit the ball. You're just waiting for the ball because for the most part "it" already happened. You're already where you need to be to hit the ball. But if you're not prepared? Well, you have no chance of hitting it. Make sense? When I move to the future on people... understand, all I have to do is "swing". I'm just waiting for the ball. 

 "Those skilled in the art of war bring the enemy to the field of battle and are not brought there by him."

                          --Sun Tzu, The Art of War

This idea that “it already happened” in my view is not only light years ahead of what others are doing but as I said also one of the reasons why folks who do not appreciate this concept can’t see the opportunities available to them even when they do it. Because they don’t believe it’s possible they can’t get there in the mind so they can’t see it, or feel it in the body, even though the shit is right in their face, like all of the time.

I can remember sitting in Pete’s Restaurant with John and Master Kevin Harrell after a class and John asked us, 

“Is it me or are people letting me win when I’m doing my demonstrations?”

 So we were like, “Whatchutalkinbout!?!”

He went on to explain that when doing a demonstration with some 4^th Degrees how he shouldn’t be able to throw them off the way he did. So now Kevin and I are looking at him and I’m like,

“John, what are you talking about? You do that to us and we’re Masters, so what do you even mean?”

So he’s like,

“No really? Are people taking it easy on me and letting me win to not mess up my demonstrations?”

So I said,

“Sure John people are showing you respect when doing the demos but that’s because they also don’t want to get hurt. If they ‘go’ you’re going to go because you may have no choice in order to not get hurt so while folks are coming at you, they also know there’s a place they can’t go. It’s simple to me if we try to hurt you-you're going to hurt us. So just like they’re not trying to really hurt you, you’re not trying to really kill folks. Makes sense to me.”

I then went on,

“You know John and I’m going to say this in front of Kevin so there’s no mistake at what I’m saying here. There’s something you have got to get over about your ability. I don’t think you realize there is something you do that is like really, really weird. I remember you telling me how you always since you were young, always tried to make other people feel awkward when fighting you how you always tried to make people miss. And after you told me that I really started paying attention to your movement. And then when you had that altercation with those guys at the DMV and how you just handled those guys who were much bigger than me and Kevin.”

So John’s like, “Yeah okay.”

So, I said something like,

“John the reason those guys got rocked just like the guys you just thrashed in class is that they couldn’t get out of your way. John… I’m telling you because I’ve experienced it too. You move in a way that not only alters how others move but you’re causing folks to move in a predictable fashion. In other words, you’re making people move that way but they don’t know it. I’m not saying it was anything planned it’s just that your movement throws people off I know because I’ve felt it myself.”

Of course, John was like, “Yeah maybe so…”

Unreal…

To me, this is a unique talent. What a gift? What an ability?

This whole concept of moving to the future to cut off a person's movement before they really get going, to me, is one of the main panaceas of the martial arts that people spend a fortune seeking out yet rarely (like almost never) get. There are a number of reasons for this that I’ll probably cover in a later post. I just wanted to bring this up just to put it in your mind that;

• These things that I describe exist and are “very real” they are the “art in the science” of Guided Chaos.
• There is a knowledge to fighting and movement that goes beyond mere physical ability. This is that intersection I believe between intellect and physical ability or what we call "talent".
• There is a way to learn how to get ahead of movement but you have to develop a number of other things first "in the body" in order to begin to learn it but learn it you can.

Well, that’s it for this installment. As always.

Thank you.

LtCol Al Ridenhour

Senior Master Instructor

GUIDED CHAOS

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