The Warrior Scholar Ideal - The Mind for Training 009

In the previous installment of the Warrior-Scholar, we discussed the importance of training. However, when we describe training, we are not just alluding to the physical discipline required to forge oneself into a peerless warrior but, as well, the mindset necessary to step into the darkness, to come to terms with the finality of death, the ugly side of violence, and to make peace with the Shadow Self, the deepest, darkest part of our personality, so that it will reveal itself.

There is evil in the world, and no matter how refined we think of ourselves, underneath the thin veneer we call civilization lurks the raw, unambiguous truth: civilization is a lie, and it is only the sword and the fear of it that maintains the illusion of safety. Civilization, in a nutshell, is nothing more than people implicitly agreeing with one another to refrain from mutual destruction.

On Technique and The Way

 “Teaching people a large number of sword techniques is turning the way into a business of selling goods, making beginners believe that there is something profound in their training by impressing them with a variety of techniques. This attitude toward strategy must be avoided, because thinking that there is a variety of ways of cutting a man down is evidence of a disturbed mind. In the world, different ways of cutting a man down do not exist.”

 - Miyamoto Musashi, A Book of Five Rings

Let’s cut to the chase: We must be willing, through training, to transform ourselves into monsters so that we are capable of reckoning with those monsters who would prey upon innocents, whether ourselves or others in our midst. When you get right down to it, the skill and the will to kill the enemy is the whole raison d’etre (the “reason for being”) of a martial art.

Yet this fundamental insight is missing in the world of martial development. Consider the plethora of self-defense videos on YouTube. For all of their differences, they tend to share the following characteristic in common: On the one hand, the instructors featured in the videos discuss methods of dealing with various scenarios, often proposing complex solutions that require a high level of physical ability. In practically one and the same breath, they ridicule other techniques that are much more realistic for the average person to pull off.

In one video, an instructor demonstrated how to deal with someone attempting a double or single-leg takedown by focusing upon creating separation or sprawling. Now, whether such a technique would prove successful in handling an attacker is neither here nor there. What is telling is that the instructor expressed doubt in the effectiveness of a strike of some sort to the back of the head or neck of an assailant.   

This reveals a total lack of understanding of the nature and context of a real attack.

Someone attacking you in a confrontation outside of a sports contest, whether they intend to or not, has to be perceived as a threat to your life. It is not your job to be a mind reader. Someone attacking you is reason enough to go on the offensive in the most ruthless, the most brutal fashion.

Even sports martial arts acknowledge the danger of strikes to the back of the head and, especially, the neck. This, after all, is why such techniques are barred from almost all sports competitions. Otherwise, these sports would not be sports; they would be something else entirely. Yet this particular instructor in this video was less than confident that such strikes would work but sure that sprawling or other separation techniques were more effective.

To be clear, that the techniques being advocated by practitioners of systems other than our own has absolutely nothing to do with our critiques of either those techniques or the systems in which they’re taught. We could care less about what people are taught, or by whom they’re taught. Our problem is in regard to the mindset within which this instruction is offered.

It is most emphatically not a martial mindset.

“Martial,” many have seemed to have forgotten, if they ever knew it at all, means “of or pertaining to war.” War. Historically and etymologically, the martial arts were always understood to be the warrior arts, the arts of war.

War is mortal combat, nothing more, nothing less. In a state of war, as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes noted back in the 17^th century, all parties know that even when actual blood isn’t being shed, the disposition to inflict a violent death upon the enemy is constantly present (conversely, so too is the possibility of suffering a violent death at the hand of the enemy). This being said, students of a genuine martial art should forever be training to make themselves into, not “tough guys,” not “athletes,” not world class “competitors,” not specimens of “health and fitness,” not “gurus,” and not “street fighters.”

They should be training, in all that they do, to make themselves into elite warriors.

And let’s be candid as to what this means, for one’s training is inevitably doomed to go awry unless and until every bit of confusion and self-delusion is rooted out. To make oneself into a peerless warrior is to make oneself into the perfect weapon, an all-purpose weapon, a maximally efficient killing machine.

The only people upon whom decent human beings should train to unleash violence are the thoroughly indecent, those who, for sport, prey upon the innocent. And the only time that this violence should be used is when the only alternative to doing so is to become a victim.

Imagine being awakened in the middle of the night out of a sound sleep by multiple, possibly armed intruders, and they’re just feet away from where your child sleeps. In such a situation, squaring off in a conventional boxing stance, putting up “your dukes,” so to speak, or throwing a roundhouse karate kick, or putting up your hands to signal that you don’t want any trouble before striking, or grappling—all of these sorts of moves are worse than useless in this kind of situation; they are almost certain to get anyone foolish enough to try them, as well as their family members, killed. Such techniques require both time and space that are not available to the person who goes from having sweet dreams to having to contend with several armed thugs in his home.

This is because this person immediately discovers that he is now at war.

Our contention is that while those who study what we conventionally refer to as “martial” arts for purposes of health and fitness, competition, tradition, aesthetics, or whatever are indeed pursuing good and noble goals. Yet they are not the essential purpose of a genuinely martial art. If they can be attained through martial training, they are incidental to it. The essential purpose of a martial art is to make its practitioners into warriors, into those who excel in the art of critically injuring, maiming, and, ultimately, killing the enemy.

The enemy. There are opponents in sport and contests. In war, however, there is only the enemy.

What separates those who train so as to restore the martial character to the martial arts and those who prefer to regard martial arts as sport is that the former recognizes the danger that they may face for what it actually is, a potentially mortal threat. We are not mind readers, so any aggressor, regardless of his own subjective intentions, could take the life of the innocent that he threatens. The practitioners of the warrior arts train to cultivate the will to use lethal force, if needed, to neutralize the threat.

Undoubtedly, a sports fighter or any proficient martial artist, of any system, can perform virtually any basic self-defense technique. Indeed, it is precisely the simplicity and accessibility to your average non-athlete of fundamental self-defense techniques that make them eminently serviceable, and eminently appealing, in the first place. However, even in those systems that concentrate on the perfection of these techniques, there remains a reluctance to train them in the spirit of the warrior, to treat them as weapons of war.

All too often, you find self-defense systems that focus on survival as the end of conflict. Victory is not their objective. In fact, though, the best chance one has to survive in a confrontation is to win the fight by any means. The point is that you should seek victory first, no matter the odds, because no matter what you do, if faced with life and death, fighting back and fighting to win is the only logical way to improve your chances. Doing nothing when there is no other choice is not an option. Well, it’s certainly not a good option.

Mental Training

“Warrior Flow works because it rests on innate ways of perceiving and processing information that are natural to everyone and connects that way of sensing and thinking to effortlessly acting in an effective way regardless of your age, level of fitness, or previous experience.”

- Joe Riggio, Senior Master Instructor Warrior Flow

In Warrior Flow, we have a saying:

“If you want to do the thing you want to be able to do, you have to practice doing the thing you want to do so as to develop the skills that make it happen.”

The body follows the mind, and the mind is reinforced by what we feel we are capable of in the body. 

Ninety-five percent of everything we do, including the decisions we make, is in the body, resulting from how we have trained ourselves to the subconscious competence level to perform. It is through our perceptions of the sensorial input when training that we reshape our being. Thus, the expression that we do not rise to the occasion but fall back to the level of our training. This includes the ability to escalate to violence to use lethal force.

Because most people are not trained to use lethal force, to end confrontations immediately, the ruthlessness and brutality necessary to deal with evil escape them. Now, some martial artists who we’ve known don’t think that most people can ever get themselves to develop the ruthless intention needed to prevail over ruthless attackers.  

This is debatable.

Our contention is that whether they can or can’t, failing to train them to do so is not the answer. If a person comes to us for training, there is an expectation on that person’s part that he or she will be trained to a certain level of lethality. Otherwise, that individual wouldn't be there. As far as we are concerned, whether the student develops the will or not, it will not be for a lack of knowledge or skill. It’s analogous to military training: No matter what you do with your rifle, it won’t be for lack of knowledge and skill.

Generally speaking, self-defense students are not trained for life-and-death combat, so they lack the proper focus needed when they have to actually do something. And this is why the demonstrations supplied by their instructors often have an artificial air about them.

It’s not that the techniques taught couldn’t be effective. They could be, as long as the static conditions of a demo are replicated in a real-world attack—which, of course, they never will be. There is an adrenaline-fueled dynamism to a violent encounter that inescapably affects the ways in which the parties to it, whether the agents are defenders or offenders, move their bodies. And whether or not aggressors plan upon murdering those upon whom they set their sights; this is something about which the target has neither the capacity nor the responsibility to determine. He or she knows this much for certain: The belligerent or belligerents mean to do them egregious bodily harm.

But because the attacked haven’t trained to evict the bad guys from the land of the living, there are moves, strikes, that, while simpler, more efficient, and more lethal than those to which they trained, they won’t be aware of those possibilities. Because they haven’t been trained to view martial arts as the arts of war, they will default to their training and opt for techniques that are more difficult to apply under duress, are not maximally efficient, and are not lethal.

Time: The One Constant Governing What is Possible

"Warrior Flow is a scientific systematization of combat and independent of the influence of opinions, staying only with the facts of reality and what is possible or not in a violent interaction with or without weapons.”

 - Luciano Imoto, Creator of Tai Chi Imoto

Along with the creator of Tai Chi Imoto, Luciano Imoto, we share the identical understanding when it comes to real combative skill and eschew those opinions not grounded in fact. With that said, the other thing that we believe is often misunderstood is…time. This is the one area with respect to which we are all equal. So, no matter what technique you use, if you have enough time to execute it, then it can and will work. The point, obviously, can be put negatively: Regardless of how devastating a technique is, and how proficient in its use a person may be, if the person hasn’t sufficient time to execute it, it will not work. This is one of the main reasons why, in Warrior Flow, we do not engage in overly complex movements and place a premium on smooth, efficient movements.

There is a way the universe works and a way it doesn't, this is what is meant by, "staying only with the facts of reality and what is possible..." Our opinions are irrelevant to the facts and time is no respecter of our feelings. You either have time to accomplish something or you don't. 

The more complex the technique, the more time it requires to be effective. So, if you cannot move with maximum speed and efficiency under duress, you are more likely to fail when the moment of truth arrives. This complexity often makes the techniques during demonstrations look stiff or jerky, slow and even unrealistic regardless of their potential effectiveness. This is a very common criticism of many skills taught in reality-based systems. It is for this reason when viewing a technique, we always focus on the context of what is being presented. We need to add when we describe complexity, we are not just referring to overly complex movements but more often people overlooking simple techniques to obvious solutions to a problem.

The reason people overlook the simple solutions is because they are not training a martial art as war whereas ending the fight immediately is the end state. They think such strikes to the neck and other vulnerable areas do not work of various reasons, but the truth is they do not work if you lack the moral will to use them with lethal force, which could be said for almost any technique. So, it escapes them. This is a condition that must be resolved between your ears as well as in the body.

You have to train to it.  

Contextualizing Experience

Additionally, because this is a part of the problem, when looking at a technique often what people see are the beginning and end results of a movement, however what is missing or usually the case and not explained at all, are the hundreds of micromovements happening in between as a person tracks the motion of their protagonist. This lack of explanation leads to a misapplication of technique since it divorces people from how their body sensorially processes and tracks movement. Thus, the decisions they make are no more than a role of the dice. 

This is one of the reasons arts that emphasize lots of hands-on physical contact such as the close in fighting and grappling arts allow people to develop a more realistic feel for combat. Through direct contact they are able to develop the feel and touch to sensorially track the movement patterns of another person. The more impressions they gain through practice the faster they learn to deal with things before they become a problem for them or correct themselves and counteract another person's motion. All of course provided the training experience is framed in the proper context and mental framework that interaction is designed to allow for maximum lethal efficiency and execution in a compressed timeframe.

This also emphasizes the importance of practicing things at speed and from time-to-time to the edge of danger. Combat is dangerous, without walking the edge of the abyss one never learns to operate in a state of heightened arousal, which is the very essence of combat. There are just things your body will not learn unless you habituate this experience. To train otherwise is to deceive one's soul. It doesn't take much but we all must every now and then move with the urgency that only the fear of God can instill in men because the time to learn overcoming this feeling is not in the heat of battle. 

One thing we see repeatedly is that when people are demonstrating a technique, they tend to move way, way too much. Granted, they are doing a demonstration, so we understand that there will be an exaggeration of the movements to allow people to see what is happening. However, because the information is framed in a manner where that is never made clear. This leaves people in a lurch where they mimic movement rather than absorb the essence of the technique. Consequently, they end up too focused on form over function. Too much superfluous motion and unnecessary preparatory movements give away their intention. 

This is just as much a function of mindset as it is one of physical training.

When you do not train to end a conflict with ruthless efficiency and look at martial arts as anything other than war, you end up overlooking the obvious and more effective ways of dispatching an attacker.

This is the bottom line.  

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

LtCol Al Ridenhour USMC (ret)

Authors, The Warrior Scholar Ideal Revisited