“It is very clear that Guided
Chaos must be felt. Much will be revealed that cannot through reading, and
video. All the drills lead up to the actual application of Guided Chaos… The
exercises are designed to enhance the average martial artist’s basic abilities
and to guide the Guided Chaos student when a class is not available… All the
principles that can be learned from the book and videos will put a student in
the right direction for enhancing basic power and all the other attributes.
Physical initiation can give a spark toward a deeper understanding. The
ultimate result is to feel like water and then vapor… The higher levels are
there to be discovered even if only for the art of it…”
– Grand Master John Perkins
Over the years from my training with Grandmaster Perkins one of the things
that I’ve always been fascinated with is the ease of how he negates the
movement of another person. It seems that regardless of size he always seems to
know how to move just enough and soon enough to preempt the other person’s
movement. The thing that I think that is often overlooked is not so much
what he is doing but how he thinks about a thing and how he thinks about
dealing with things.
In this installment of “Lessons from My Masters” I’m going to
delve a little into this but more from a philosophical perspective rather than
discuss any specific techniques because I think to focus solely on technique is
one of the reasons people often miss what he is teaching or describing. But
before I get into all of that I need to talk a little about my Master and
friend because people I feel need to understand this.
“When I’m working with you I’m
always working two to three levels deeper than what it appears I’m doing…”
–Grandmaster John Perkins
John says this stuff all the time and “whoosh…” it goes right over people’s
heads. Part of the problem is as humans we’re always looking for the definitive
answer to everything. We do not like uncertainty, we want to know how to deal
with this or how to deal with that. We want John to tell us specifically “in
detail” what he is doing when he is doing it and why he is doing it. We want
instant feedback. We want an exact science when in truth, while there’s probably
a science to how 99% percent of what we do and how it works, much of that
understanding at this time is probably beyond us.
Meaning, I’m sure there’s a logical explanation or a science to how he does
many of the things he does, but the explanation at this time escapes us and all
that we know based on how the human body operates within time and space when
moving dynamically.
Remember, in science you start off with a hypothesis or, as we used to say
in the Marine Corps, a “SWAG” (scientific wild ass guess). And as you prove
things out as you go along where required you have to modify your theory to
suit the facts that are known at that time. The point is there’s more we don’t
know than we probably know which leaves plenty of room for discovery. Well,
isn’t “discovery” kind of the point?
When I work with John the main thing I try to do is to focus on whatever it
is he wants me to do because I know there is other stuff going on and if I
concentrate just on that thing my mind will get out of the way of the other 50
things that are going on that I’m picking up on that my cognitive mind is
unaware of.
So if he says, “Just move with me” then that’s what I try to do
because otherwise I don’t learn to feel what else is going on. If he
says, “Move a little faster with me and just focus on hitting”, “Stay
loose with this and try not to move your feet”. Or sometimes he
says, “Stay with me, if you can and step with this”.
John is The Master of “paradoxical learning”, and he’s all about getting
your body to do what it needs to do without directly telling you he’s doing it.
It’s an amazing talent that both he and Grandmaster Carron had that I always,
within my own abilities, try to emulate when teaching—that’s why often students
will hear me say, “Stop messing my drill up just do the thing I want you
to do and let me worry about correcting you”. This was a very important lesson
that I learned from my Masters.
You see for the most part people don’t want to fail, and even more
importantly people don’t want to look bad so they are always trying to “not
make a mistake” when working with me. But they have it all wrong you
see trying to not make a mistake “is the mistake”. Please re-read what I
just said because if you get that, life will get a whole lot easier for you in
your training especially if you’re training with someone more advanced than
you.
When I work with John I try very hard to fight this urge because I know it
gets in my way, the reason is he already knows the answers because he’s
controlling to flow of the battle. More often than not he’s allowing openings
to allow my mind to learn without thinking of where to strike.
John you see is “always doing stuff” as I like to call it, and
every time you “try to win” as I like to call it (i.e., prove you are as good
or know more than he does about his own art, oh yeah… I’ve seen this in folks)
you short circuit what he is trying to get your body and mind to do. So
stop messing his drill up!
John also has a great sense of humor, and whether he’s just messing with me
or whatever, he’s always having fun. It is not uncommon for him to say to
me, “Move with me, just have fun with this…” I can honestly say that
when I work with John, even when the lesson was demanding I can’t recall not
having fun. It’s always interesting at the least and fun. When people see me
working with John unless we’re filming something more often than not I’m
laughing half the time because I can’t believe some of the stuff he does, but
it’s always fun.
This to me is a key thing toward helping people learn as well as cope with
the fear of almost getting their heads severed from their bodies. When you’re
having fun you’re more likely to stay in the battle, you forget your fear and
even if you’re getting pounded because as you learn to become more
“unavailable” you literally thrive on dodging bullets while returning fire.
It’s sort of like friends I had in the Marine Corps who insisted on jumping
out of perfectly working aircraft, as one of my buddies recounted when he got
jump qualified, “The first time you jump you’re scared to death, the
second time you’re like ‘I got this’, the third time your like get out of my
way I’m going first. The fear and apprehension never goes away, it becomes,
believe or not, ‘like a rush’ when you jump”.
While I was never jump qualified I’ve done plenty of rappelling out of
helicopters to know the feeling. It’s one thing to rappel off of a tower it’s
quite another from a helicopter that’s swaying as you lean over the rail and go
for it.
Anyway…
I don’t care who you are in Guided Chaos, the first time you dodge something
that you know if it were for real that it would have possibly killed you and
you return the favor striking in sync, I don’t care who you are, inside, your
mind goes, “Now that was fucking way cool”. Let’s be honest hitting people
is a lot of fun, and hitting them after you made them miss is even more fun.
All you need is that quick “dopamine hit” and you’re all about doing it
again. That’s why I often have to admonish students when they’re working with
me to “not admire yourself” too much when they do something really cool because
they may have some more fighting to do.
One of the things that I’ve learned over the years that I believe is a major
takeaway from working with my Masters was the difference in thought as to how
they viewed not only themselves but other people. I already spoke on how Tim
used to view people. Well as you can imagine, John has a similar view as well.
I can remember talking with John to get his view on this and it went along
the lines of, when looking at a person as a potential threat, instead of
looking at them from the perspective of “if I had to deal with this person
I don’t know…what would I do?” instead you should view if from the mindset
of “if I had to deal with this person for real how would I make myself
unavailable yet unavoidable to end it as quickly as possible?”, “How would I
move to negate their advantages?” “How would I avoid a bad situation in the
first place etc.…” the point is by thinking in this fashion you begin to
develop a more realistic approach to mentally preparing yourself for the
potential blood bath that may occur and not one rooted in irrational fear and
false hope.
John’s way of looking at this sort of thing is actually
quite simple. As he’s related to me numerous times:
“If I can “perceive” your intention no matter how slight then not only can I
manipulate you but I can move in a way to cut you off, or wait for you to run
into my strikes. By moving even in the slightest I can alter the fight before
your momentum gets going and do all of these things at once. I’m always
throwing a monkey wrench in your movement to throw you off”.
Or words to that effect. Because it needs to be said, one point I want to
reiterate that I’ve discussed before in other blog posts, is that all too often
in Guided Chaos as one’s skills develop they attempt to control another
person’s movement by trying to stop everything they are doing. The problem with
trying to stop everything is, again:
1) it makes you defensive which is a mistake of like 99% percent of martial
arts systems;
2) it allows your attacker to regroup for another attack and keeps him in the
fight;
3) it plays to your attacker’s advantages if they are larger, stronger or
faster than you and
4) there are just some things you cannot stop because the physics in that
particular instance are just not in your favor.
How long in a real fight to the death do you think you can keep this sort of
thing up?
The point is you can’t win on the defense. At some point you have to put some
points on the board.
Now as I appear to speak out of the other side of my mouth there is a way to
stop people but it has to do with cutting them off before they get their
momentum going—but that’s for another time.
Enough on that…
The Inverse Relationship of Movement from One Person to Another
Okay this is wild…
When reading this you need to suspend all disbelief and you really need to
get out of your own way. When we discuss the Five Principles of Guided Chaos:
BALANCE, LOOSENESS, SENSITIVITY, BODY UNITY and ADAPTIVITY (sometimes referred
to as FREEDOM OF ACTION), the one that always (at least in my mind) gets short
shrift is “FREEDOM OF ACTION”. This I believe is because FREEDOM OF ACTION is
purely mental.
You see when we say “FREEDOM OF ACTION” what we’re really taking about is
“CREATIVITY”. CREATIVITY is hard. The reason, I believe, from my own
observations both in the art and elsewhere in my experiences, is because being
CREATIVE is an entirely different thought process.
Again, it’s been my experience that people who are CREATIVE whether in
music, art, science, business and of course the martial arts, literally look at
the world through a different pair of eyes. They could be looking at the same
thing that everyone else is looking at and where people only see one possibility
they see 10,000 possibilities.
This is the reason why when I used to train with my Masters unless there was
something specific they were showing me I never had a clue as to what they were
doing. The reason is whatever they were doing with me seemed like it always
came out of “the ether” or “the void” was because they were already there. Even
if they were only mentally ahead of my movement, they were already there none
the less.
If you ever wonder how most Guided Chaos practitioners seem like they’re everywhere
and nowhere, it is this philosophical underpinning of the art (as developed by
the Grandmaster) that allows for this. Many people by the way are doing this
but they don’t know it so as a result they can’t take advantage of it because
they don’t even know they’re doing it.
Once you begin to understand a little bit more about motion and how to deal
with it, you then need to understand that there is an “Inverse
Relationship” to moving with another person, a “cause and effect” that you
have on their motion and their motion has on you and/or others who may be
involved at a given time in the battle. This is the essence of how the
Grandmaster negates the movement of others even when they are doing the
“right” thing.
(By
the way, in my opinion, if you get this understanding and begin to work it, it
will have an exponential effect on your skills. This understanding has the
effect of negating, countering, shaping and redirecting multiple movements
simultaneously within the same amount of time to accomplish one movement.)
Again, all too often in the martial arts, as people begin to learn how to
deal with motion (including within Guided Chaos) they want the answer as to
how: how to stop “this” or how to stop “that”.
They’re really asking the wrong
question. What they should be asking is how did the person get there in the
first place, and what can they do to prevent it from ever happening again?
(i.e., don’t let it happen in the first place).
For example: a person grabs, deflects or pushes a person’s arm or touches them
in a way to cut them off. Aside from the obvious of “How did they get there in
the first place?”, they must understand that everything done after that
is usually too late if one is thinking about what just happened the wrong way.
Just as an aside, I never, ever if possible, wait for people to do things,
and even when it appears that way it’s usually because I already set the
condition for them to fail. In other words, once I set the trap I have to give
you time to fail in order for it to work otherwise if I move too soon you’ll
pick it up and do something different.
It’s just like fishing: if you want to catch the fish you have to learn how
to “set the hook”. Pull the lure out too fast and the fish can’t bite down on
it, pull it too slow and he recognizes it’s a lure and spits it out. The timing
must be just right.
The other question they should be asking (when touched of course) is are
they (the attacker) touching, grabbing, pushing my arm or am I allowing them to
be there in order to set them up to be crushed?
This is crucially important because
depending on how you answer the question will determine how you will respond
since your actions will be based on how you perceive what is going on. This
understanding by the way is at the root of how I set people up for failure. I
feel where they are and based on what I am feeling, I create so much “stimuli”
that their brains become confused. Causing them to make (from their
perspective) “the right choice”, but from my perspective it is for them “the wrong
choice”!
This is important because as long as you can get a person to not react
appropriately or react at all by hitting their panic reflex causing them to
change their body position or posture, they will generally make the wrong
decision because they don’t know it was wrong in the first place.
Like Napoleon once said, “When your enemy is making a mistake, don’t
interrupt him…”
Here, here!
Grandmaster Perkins has mentioned this many times to me under “The
Wisdom Tree”. He calls this “Sleight of Mind” or “Sleight of Body”.
I’m so all about this!
The point is (stay with me on this) because this blew my mind when he
discussed this with me and I’m paraphrasing what he said here. So
philosophically speaking:
• Your pull is my push,
• Your push is my pull,
• Your sliding energy is my skimming energy,
• Your skimming energy my sliding energy,
• Your looseness becomes my entry and penetration point or point to break
balance since you can only get but so loose,
• Your oversensitivity and overreaction to my movement becomes my pulse,
• Your root becomes my opportunity to root you and fix you to the ground so you
can’t move or isolate around that point to break your balance elsewhere,
• Your forward motion becomes my opportunity to redirect you on a different
vector,
• Your attempt to stop my arm becomes my fulcrum to load my spring and kill
you,
• Your isolation becomes my isolation,
• Your pulse my pulse,
• Your Ghosting becomes my Ghosting,
• My looseness becomes my weapon to suck you into your death,
• Your strike becomes my entry,
• Your speed becomes my speed to misdirect, redirect you to your death or
penetrate you sooner,
• Your tool replacement becomes my tool replacement or my isolation point
whatever I desire,
• When you strike you generally have only one option however my retreat or
looseness becomes limitless possibilities to destroy you,
• Your awareness becomes my awareness,
• My counter moves realign my body to cut off angles that you cannot even begin
to perceive because they are so slight, they cannot be seen with the eye but
only felt through your own awareness and through proper body unity.
And on it and on it goes… there is no end…
In other words, if I can perceive your intention and feel your motion all of
the above are always available to me.
I don’t care who you are, what you have done or can do in the heat of battle,
there are only two things here, your sword and my sword and nothing else. If
you do not have the development and the proper understanding and thought
process to go with it in the microsecond between this and that, you have
nothing.
You may be a better shot but you have to hit me and if you’re within my
Sphere of Influence you are done, because you don’t have enough time to figure
all of these things out in the microsecond they all take place.
If you can’t see it with your mind you can’t see it with your eyes even if
it’s right in front of you.
It is in the world of “Unavailable Yet Unavoidable” that I exist…
This is what My Masters taught me!
Well that’s it for this installment. There’s much more that I could say on
this but I wanted to get it out there just to start helping people understand
that there is a much larger world out there all for ours to be discovered.
I’ll leave you with this final thought: everything that you can do within your
body right now, every movement, every strike, every evasion or step, everything
that’s possible, already exists. The key is to develop your body to take
advantage of it.
The question is: why would you deny yourself this ability?
Hope you got something out of this.
Thanks.
LtCol Al Ridenhour USMC (ret)
Senior Master Instructor
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