The Warrior Scholar Idea Blog Post - The Warrior Arts 010

In the previous installment of the Warrior-Scholar, we discussed the importance of the Mind for Training. In this post we revisit the importance of developing the "Martial Mind."

“Martial” means of or pertaining to war. This being the case, the martial arts are, literally, the arts of war, the warrior arts. Therefore, in our practice this must be at the forefront of our minds in all we do. 

This is an important distinction because while there is no difference between, say, a punch from a boxer or a punch from a kickboxer, what differs from a life-and-death altercation is not the specific technique per se (because you can only do so much with your hands). Rather, it is the intent, the mindset, the moral will that sets it apart and distinguishes sport from real self-defense.

As Aristotle stated, "We are what we repeatedly do..."

Though Aristotle was talking about the pursuit of excellence, the reality is that you can also get good at the wrong things. This is at the heart of the sport fighting specific training for self-defense fallacy.

As John Smith, Senior Instructor in Warrior Flow states,

“Training in an unrealistic manner is teaching the brain and body at a deep level...lies. You program in false simulations. In actual combat, you will default to these lies. Dirty Secret: a sportive competition is, at root, a lie. Combat has no rules. Programing rules in, limits your mind and body in actual combat.”

In essence, he was referring to the idea that training within one framework or domain automatically translates into another is not only wrong thinking but an outright lie. Everything has its own dynamic and is domain-specific, and the mindset to cause malicious permanent harm or death is another world, one that has to be trained too, even if informally or at the very least an accepted reality.

While we don't need to delve into specifics, within the martial arts there are numerous examples, too many to be blunt, where a person focused on control and Queensbury Rules over ruthlessness in some cases unfortunately lost their lives. It wasn't necessarily their level of skill or fitness that failed them but the mindset in which they approached the encounter that blinded them from correctly summing up the situation and doing what needed to be done.  

"The difference between theory and practice, in theory they're both the same, in practice they are not." --Yogi Berra

Historically speaking, there was a virtually seamless unity between theory and practice as martial artists showcased their artistry in, not sportive competitions with rules designed to prevent participants from seriously harming, to say nothing of killing, one another, but, rather, on the battlefield by engaging in mortal combat with the enemy.

In the contemporary world, this older understanding is largely forgotten, if it was ever known at all. Where much of the way has been relegated to theories and little regard to the theorem of combat. The martial arts have been divested of their martial character and repurposed, for the most part, as sport.

In some instances, they have been reconfigured for the end of promoting the fitness of their practitioners, as a means, say, of burning calories, as a type of cardio exercise.

To be clear, sport and fitness are legitimate pursuits. Neither, though, should ever be confused with a martial art.

To judge from their demonstrations, a sport-like mentality appears to have even overcome the practitioners of those arts that explicitly differentiate themselves from sport, i.e., the systems of “Reality-Based-Self-Defense” (RBSD), or “Close Quarters Combatives” (CQC). And it’s almost certain that this is because, for all of the variety that exists within the martial arts/self-defense industry, the vast majority of systems are alike insofar as they are guilty of one glaring omission:

They omit to note that the essential purpose, the ultimate end, of a martial art is to equip its students with the ability and the will to kill the enemy.

In other words, to train in a martial art, an art of war, mind you, is to become a peerless assassin, one whose talent for brutality, efficiency, and, importantly, creativity, is second to none.

To train in a martial art is to make one’s whole self into a weapon. It is to recognize that every artificial weapon is only ever an extension of one’s natural weaponry, one’s body. This in turn means that the martial art student must stop seeing the threat as his opponent. He must see the threat as the enemy.

Not his enemy, mind you, but the enemy.

To think of the threat as my enemy is to run the risk of ginning up fear, hatred, rage, dread, i.e. just those feelings that could lead to self-sabotage. My enemy is too personal. And when someone believes that something poses a danger, the impulse is to repel, to push away, the danger.

The enemy is impersonal. As such, psychologically, it is easier to embrace, to combat him, or them, within the closest of ranges.

The battle for one’s life is not a boxing match. It precludes the assumption of a conventional fighting stance, i.e. the squaring off with one’s “dukes” in the air, to say nothing of roundhouse kicks, flying kicks, arm bars, wrist locks, and the deliberate targeting of “pressure points.”

The battle for one’s life will seem to come from everywhere out of nowhere. It is messy, will occur within close quarters, and there is nothing in the least cool or flashy-looking about it. It will not appear remotely choreographed.

“A bullet from a gun does not make a distinction between practice and combat. You are training to be one and the same way in your life.”
-- Miyamoto Musashi

To train in a martial art, to train so as to make oneself into a peerless warrior, one needs to achieve body mastery, i.e. control of one’s equilibrium, subtle or refined muscle movement, and perceptual awareness. Body mastery is bodily integrity in the literal sense of that term in that each of the body’s many parts are integrated with all of the others into one indivisible unity. The warrior is a self-moved mover in this respect: Strictly speaking, he doesn’t move his hands, elbows, feet, comprehensively, his body parts. He is the movement of those parts.

The warrior doesn’t possess natural weapons. He is a natural weapon.

The warrior, the student of a martial art, isn’t the cause of his strikes. This way of framing the matter implies that there is a distinction between two things, the warrior, on the one hand, and, on the other, the strikes or techniques that he executes.

A more proper way of framing the matter, one more conducive to cultivating the warrior’s mindset and, hence, his physical skill, is to regard his strikes as emanations or manifestations of himself. The droplets of sea water that land on the beach upon the crashing of a wave aren’t separate entities from the sea itself. They belong to the sea and emanate from it. The warrior should think of himself and his natural weaponry analogously.

Martial prowess is not something that the warrior does. Martial prowess is the essence of the warrior. It is his being.

The warrior is the embodiment of maximally efficient motion. Such is the efficiency, the fluidity, the subtlety of his movement that, paradoxically, it appears that he doesn’t move at all, that he is everywhere and nowhere at once. And each and all of his movements, irrespectively of how subtle and seemingly insignificant, are designed to evade and crush the enemy.

The student of the martial arts, the arts of war, is always training. Combat is motion. Thus, he who moves best, wins. Yet so too is life itself motion. This being so, every mundane activity—from walking to pushing open a door; from retrieving a coffee mug from the cabinet to picking lint off of someone’s shirt; from manipulating with our hands the many differently weighted, shaped, and textured objects that we routinely use to being physically intimate with our partners to even adjusting our bodies while we sleep—every instance of motion is an occasion for the martial student to refine his movement.

While training in the gym, studio, or dojo is obviously crucial, to limit one’s conception of training to the activities that characteristically transpire in these venues is to undercut the martial spirit, for the warrior’s way is a mode of being. It is his life. He trains, first and foremost, to kill the enemy, whether they be one or many. In all that he does, then, he is always seeking to perfect the way.

He aspires to become the way.

A restoration of the martial to the martial arts requires this reframe.

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

LtCol Al Ridenhour USMC (ret)

Authors, The Warrior Scholar Ideal Revisited