From knowledge to Intuition [Part 2]

“…become in such a way that masters cannot help but envy you whether you have demonstrated their technical teachings or not. So whichever way, become a full expression of what you are, which is exactly the intention of all martial arts teachings.”

The content of your practice depends on the context. For example, if you are working on technique, then your practice will take on an increased technical dimension. This can be beneficial, if you are working to improve something you already know, or even to pick up some rudimentary skills. Because you have not yet picked up the necessary muscle memory, as it’s known, you will want to imprint it on your system before training under pressure. But technical training can only explain what is unexplainable logically. In other words, the reality of martial arts is not a matter of analysing things to death. It’s just an activity you take care of on the path to self mastery. The technical side of things is necessary but not sufficient to develop intuitive sense, which is instructed by the wider sphere of nature and life.

It is pretty easy to memorise something in the brain unconsciously over time. You just need to repeat it over and over for a few weeks or months, like revising for an exam. It takes commitment, which bis part of the process. This is what technical drills in martial arts amounts to, a commitment to sustained practice. Understanding is another matter. This memorization is just the first step in martial arts. It takes a longer time and more intense energy to imbed this working knowledge into the system so that it works intuitively, even though the brain does not remember exactly how. However, if you just impart in the moment what you have learnt in the past, your expression and energy in performance will become gradually more dull and lethargic.

If you are looking to use up energy, because you have been indoors all day for instance, then you might just train to stop the physiological system from stagnating. This need not have anything to do with technique practice. For instance, if you stay in the gym all day, there is likely to be a deficiency in fresh air, sun light, open space, as well as peace and quiet. This may not seem important, but in my opinion a little of these things can go a long way for many reasons. When you have space and fresh air, you naturally feel more energetic and refreshed, partiularly if you’ve been indoors all day.

Increasingly however, many people are turning to chemical aids in order to improve their health and remain motivated. This is at the very same time as they are relying on too much technical training and burdening the brain with too much information. This is a natural consequence of training in artificial enviornements too much. Both chemical substitutes and over emphasis on technical training, are back up systems or precursers for the real thing. in other words, they boost the system a bit to initiate something it can already do given the right surroundings. However, confusion in this area is to be expected as long as an alternative to artificial practices is not given.

When it comes to technical training, this often involves a focus on the superficial forms. As we have just seen, technical training is a kind of memory drill. It in no way explains how martial arts actually works really. If you tried to explain the reality of martial arts on the inner level, you would just look ridiculous. It is like explaining any important nuanced experience, it’s easy to make a fool of oneself by rationalising it to others. However, technical training is a useful tool. You can be somewhat aware of the technical side of training, whilst immersed in the experience so that you are not looking to control what happens, you just ride the wave. It is as if the technical training instead acts as a reminder or prompt of what to do in particular circumstances. For example, rather than thinking in a step by step manner, you might carry key points in the mind to trigger the expression from within. It is like if you a reading a slideshow presentation. If you knew the subject well, you would just have a few words up there to trigger you and get you going on the subject you understood well. Speaking and expression then becomes natural and inutile knowledge is shared about a discipline.

Like the public speaker, your energies will be involved in the task at hand in martial arts. If you are just reading off the script it becomes subliminally counter productive and undermining of ones capabilities. In this way, it is better if you are just thinking about one thing only rather than trying to overburden the brain with details. For example, once you move into practice in a free flow manner, you could just focus on the centre, to trigger the mind in towards concentrating on the body’s centre of gravity, the Hara Centre. This works for anything. If you were to concentrate and pay attention to just about anything, this would develop the necessary single minded focus and awareness necessary for intuitive performance. The brain should become as singleminded as possible, if the energies as a whole are to function freely and unhindered. This is particularly important from the experiential learning side of things, which we will look at next.

Experiential learning means experiencing what is happening as a whole and adjusting to that reality. This then becomes the basis of experience which you feed off, rather than the scraps of partial experience. It is not just about the individual and what techniques you are doing. Nor is it about practicing from memorised scenarios or drills. These are just smalll parts, however important, of the present reality. For example, you immerse yourself in martial arts practice so that you can become aware of the demands of it rather than the details. Too much memory in this regard is like trying to run a different program at the same time as processing reality. The processor slows down to run several programs at once. However, the processor works fine if it is not syphoning off energy to to and create what it can already perceive.

Imagine you are on the laptop and you want to immerse yourself in a film, yet you’ve got half a window browser open doing some shopping at the same time. This is what many people try to do when they get involved in martial arts, as elsewhere. It’s a kind of fragmented awareness of reality, rather than a total one. When the experience is total, awareness is drawn to it in the present, rather than on what happened in the past. This is because you cannot live in the past, you can only observe it, because the nature of life is not in the past it is in the present. When there is less past, there is more presence. Nevertheless you are able to observe the past from the present only, so bringing the past (technical memory), into the present works better if you are totally involved in the present experience.

When you experience reality as it is, your expectations move beyond just the physical body and what it can theoretically do. Expectations also move beyond what happened yesterday, or the day before in some drill you did. Rather than emphasising the purely theoretical or physical experience of martial arts drills and techniques, you throw yourself wholeheartedly into the experience as a whole. Even if you bring the past in to remind you of some tips, you are still in the present. You have to be in the present to experience the past. If you are in the past you cannot experience the present. But enough musings.

If you are intensely training, the outward bound senses are quiet and still whilst the inner senses are operating intensely. These may seem strange, but if you are intensely watchful of a situation, rather than just reacting to it superficially, you naturally attain outer stillness and inner intensity. You are like the deer who senses a predator, or indeed a predator who is stalking the deer. Of course with animals this state is fleeting, but with human consciousness it can become prolonged indefinitely, even in action. In other words, you are aggressive inside yet calm on the outside. There is no danger in this if it is done properly, it isn’t like holding back expression, it’s just that expression becomes more inwardly orientated. Instead, there is a relaxed outer state in order to transmit energy and power, but an intense energy within. This is why martial arts systems speak of relaxed power, which only seems like a contradiction. If this is practiced, over time the martial artist can become intensely watchful and not rushed or hurried. Becoming too rushed and hurried tends to drain the system and evacuate its energies without sustaining it properly.

It also works the other way round. Say you want to get the energies moving outwardly because you feel stagnant, make sure that you are inwardly calm. If you let your energies go, whilst remaining inwardly calm and not drawn to peripheral concerns, the energies become malleable. In this way, it is then possible to reverse the situation so that the energies can then be drawn inwardly after they have been shaken up a bit outwardly. The need to shake things up comes because of high inner pressure which needs to be dealt with. It is like blowing a bubble, which expands from high to low pressure. Once the bubble has been blown, in other words the contents spread widely and peripherally, the inner pressure lowers and the contents naturally collapses back down. This is why it is not really possible to become relaxed until worked out the energies properly, because a relaxed state is really an expansion of a concentrated energy rather than a state of non being. This has been expressed in various ways in martial arts, for example as treating the big and small as one and the same.

In martial arts, the energies of the body undergo a state of contraction and expansion. Once the energies are back in, you clam the body and mind again and remain inwardly energised with the energy now worked out. It is like when morning due falls to the earth in the morning, having evaporated previously. It undergoes a certain transformation, and this change of state gives the water an enhanced capacity. This is known as the relationship between yin and yang, which involves a pairing of energies, which undergoes continual exchange. This is not a bi polar practice where you are up and down all the time without any real relationship, or even in a self initiated way. Instead, you bring your energies under your conscious will and behave naturally and intuitively as part of an active process of positive change. By naturally I mean as the nature within you is rather than a modification of it according to modern notions and philosophies, which again, although useful are insufficient to explain reality properly. This of course takes time and practice.

There are any number of systems of practice which look ridiculous from the outside, which have been used cleverly to stir up the energies and balance the system out. Today, many people stifle their energies so that they never really express themselves fully, nor do they ever relax. This makes intuitive practice difficult because there is so much taking off that needs to happen first. However, lots of people have no problem getting going when they’re drunk, they let out all their energies and act with more vigour. The problem is, there’s a hangover and a lot of wasted energy. This is because this is all done without conscious awareness and can lead to poor judgement and decision making. To do this without external substances, is known as drunken boxing, or working with the internal elixir. No doubt many masters have become drunk for various reasons, but this has nothing to do with martial arts really.

When a martial artist mimics the state of relaxed free and easy movements that a drinker makes, they are practicing a kind of drunken boxing. When someone is fully conscious of this, rather than having their consciousness suppressed by actual substance use, they instead become playful, relaxed, and unhindered. Have you noticed, that if you start dancing around like a drunk person when you are sober, you soon become slightly intoxicated for a time? Personally, I have done this often. It is true that any sustained state can have an affect on people around you, or even within. Aside from being fun at a party, becoming more playful and relaxed is a good way to diffuse an argument because you don’t give off a stiff unrelenting attitude. This is by far the best strategy for avoiding trouble by diffusing the threat before it happens. It is an extremely effective strategy to infect your opponent with an attitude of joyfulness and ease. And because you’re not actually drunk and are fully conscious, you don’t flip from one extreme to the other or push things too far with bad judgement.

Drunken master style is not really a fighting style. It allows you to play around with movements of any kind that practically speaking would be inadvisable. Drunken boxing is a style of playfulness, where the practitioner is doing it for fun, even if they die in the process. When the energies become playful, you naturally become less of a target for the many people out there who might want to take out their misery on you, knowingly or unknowingly. Above all, drunken boxing is an energy state rather than a practical method. I have not read this in any martial arts texts directly, it’s simply my own conclusion. There are many levels of martial arts, mental, physical, and energetic, for instance. This attitude of reckless abandon, or drunken boxing, can even be done with the most ridiculous looking martial arts forms to make things more lively and joyful. Otherwise it would be pointless to even bother.

The only real impediment to training is losing the joy and energy for it in the end. If the energies remain high and your are enjoying the process, you don’t suffer anything because its all fuel for the furnace. On the energy level anything can be useful. This is why intuitive practice, which aims to orientate the energy levels a certain way, is a useful approach. So from time to time it’s good to get as far away as possible from the serious side of martial arts. In this way you are still training, just a different dimension. For instance, if you turn inward and become still and more meditative, you might be surprised to find new energy for no external reason at all.

You see, people are always looking for external reasons. they think it’s because of this or because of that thing. They think they are only good because they have won somthing. But in my experience, these events happen any way and they just correlate with what everyone experiences on the inner level. For example, if you lost a match, you have still experienced the thrill of competition and the win through somebody else. As long as you are fully engaged with the process, the result makes little difference. This insight can become invaluable if your experience of training has become boring. We tend to think we are bored because we a not succeeding, in the narrow sense of the word. In fact everybody gets bored, regardless of what they are doing. If you win at everything, you will just find another problem. The deciding factor is whether you can extract gold from any experience.

So even if you’re a serious competitor, it will become more relaxed and fluid if you take it less seriously from time to time. It will be more intuitive even if your technical practice has been neglected for a time. This is so long as long as the mind is focused and sensible, even if the exercises and energise are lively and wild.

If you get carried away by your own performances, or too concerned with the outcome, this is known as being beaten by the inner enemy. This is why many of the masters of the past have been considered as mad, they have given up the game altogether. there is nothing wrong with the game. In reality, it is a controlled kind of liveliness which is no different fundamentally from the need to blow of some steam in a nightclub. There are many ways to go about this. Many people, after all, would become a nervous wreck if they were unable to get to the nightclub on a Saturday night! Society has always needed ways of working out energy and relieving tension. This is just one way.

Full on bareknuckle experience is of course dangerous if ones does not know what they are doing. There are often all sorts of unpleasant experiences which go on in nightclubs, which fly under radar of peoples awarenesses. You will see this if you go down there fully sober. This is why traditional martial arts has always looked to cultivate the right attitude as well as the physical tools in preparation for the real thing, because it can become overwhelming without preparation.

Styles such as drunken boxing are usually reserved for students under the tutelage of a master. Once again, I don’t know the formalities of drunken boxing according to Chinese systems, but I know that it all derived from buddhist teachings, which spoke of becoming intoxicated from within. So becoming intoxicated from within, in a natural way, is fostered by supporting environments. This is because the relationship fostered by such an environment prevents indivudals getting caught up in the process of self expression and letting go, avoiding stupid situations. The aim is to prevent too much too soon, and this is why such systems will always be accused of being ineffectual by modern standards where the aim is to experience everything at once. Of course experiencing everything at once is an equally good way of knowing, but according to eastern systems, this carries various dangers. This is where traditionally East and West have differed significantly.

From the purely practical perspective, it makes perfect sense just to endlessly perform physical drills, even taking performance enhancing drugs so you can do more of this. This is the practical and serious side of martial arts. On the subject of external chemicals, one of the side effects of taking steroids is that users have experienced liver problems. This is no surprise, because all drugs have side effects. Another such side effect is the decrease in the natural production of hormones when replacements are over subscribed. In other words, where they are naturally produced, they nourish those areas first before anything else. the situation with performance enhancers is to bypass this and create a demand elsewhere, which can only lead to maintenance issues of the body and its resources further down the road.

When someone values winning over others so much, there is usually a deficit in motivation from within. What this often means for the system as a whole is that something is being syphoned off from somewhere to support a hyper abundance of development elsewhere. For example, there might be an excessive sensory need for stimulus from the outside world, which takes on the job of satisfying the inner life. This obviously isn’t the best solution overall, because it relies on all sorts of factors outside of your control. You then potentially don’t have the necessary means of maintaining long term health because energy is all being borrowed from outside factors, which change over time, to sustain the system. For example, say you have a need for others to love everything you do. This obviously doesn’t drive optimal organ functioning, digestion, or energy circulation to any significant degree. And yet, this is what many people are relying on to survive. In other words, the normal survival process has been reversed, and happenings in life have been mistaken for the source. People have moved from creating to consuming.

This is exactly how steroids work, they encourage growth where it does not usually occur, at the expense of life sustaining organ systems. You consume instead of create. If this becomes the basis of experience, then other areas suffer and a certain stagnancy creeps in. In the case of performance enhancing drugs, it is not that there is too much hormones, it’s that they aren’t necessarily being utilised effectively for health. Hormones are not the problem, it’s how they are used, whether they arrive internal or externally. For example, a strong body is the result of a strong core and a healthy functioning. This is the source of strength. The source has been mistaken for the result, and people start abusing steroids to go straight for the result without working on the source. Once again, they consume rather than create the process, mistaking this for a definitive advantage. It really is that simple. If you work on the source, it will be so busy circulating the energies effectively and intelligently, that you won’t need to throw yourself into work which is unsupportive of this. This isn’t a judgement, as many people are free to take steroids. They are neither better nor worse than natures solution, just different.

When excessive build up of energy in the liver occurs, this can lead to various ailments. There are methods for alleviating this, whether you have taken steroids or not. For example, the Chinese systems of Tai Chi, as well as yoga, have developed various exercises to massage the abdomen and increase circulation around the internal organs. Problems can occur anyway, it is a question of enhancing health. These exercises not only increase circulation, but also the distribution and supply of various health promoting hormones in the body. The problem is that, because these exercises increase vitality and health, they need to be maintained the more activity one does in order to become powerful methods. It is the same with pills, they need to be consumed regularly and with additional life changes. This is particularly so as one gets older and wishes to still train physically to a high level without performant enhancers.

So the traditional practices of martial arts engage the practitioner in exercises which are aimed at establishing health as well as fitness. The goal is also to establish a work ethic which matures later in life, much like a long term investment. There is then not the same reliance on brute force in all transactions thereafter. Establishing the right attitude is needed in the beginning stage particularly, because the young martial artist tends to do everything with reckless abandon. This is why the traditional arts always hold the disciple back, there is no question of their energy only their understanding. Instead, when in martial arts you work towards a high ideal rather than for purely personal reasons, you are setting in motion future possibilities rather than immediate gains. The disciples of old would work tirelessly, often doing back breaking work, and when the energies and efforts reached boiling point, they would become more malleable. Many people believe that this was to manipulate the disciple. This is not so, although undoubtedly, corruptions can happen in all areas of society.

A genuine master has no interest in controlling the disciple, because they don’t want the baggage associated with such a relationship. So after many hours of unrelenting work, the disciple would undergo an inner transformation and would be at ease to change their own form. This was seen as the beginning of inner progress, because when this boiling point is reached, the energies become malleable and easily transformative. Whatever was fragmented became defragmented. This requires dedication and work, as well as commitment between master and disciple. Is a master needed? Not at all. I have already explained some of the methods people have used to transform themselves and their energies. This can be done by anyone, but generally is not. So if you are willing to take utter responsibility for your practice, and not dwell on complaining when it goes wrong, then anything is possible. If you do this properly, you become in such a way that masters cannot help but envy you whether you have demonstrated their technical teachings or not. So whichever way, become a full expression of what you are, which is exactly the intention of all martial arts teachings.