Written by Guss Wilkinson 2004
This article attempts to lift the lid on this peculiar thing called martial arts, why it can be of benefit to us in more ways than just learning to fight, how this journey forms us that travel it and how it can shape our views on life.
I will then go on to share some of the views that I have on life – it will be a bit of a soul bearing exercise in places and some of the views that I have are controversial. Martial arts stamps it character on us, but it is important to realise that this is a two way process: we also stamp our characters on martial arts.
This therefore is my character and these are my opinions: they needn’t be yours, they needn’t be right and hey, they are not written in stone either – I may change my opinions.
If nothing else, it may be a lot of fun to read this in 20-years time and look back upon myself and say, wasn’t I a plonker then?
OK then, let’s see how this pans out – it could be quite a long article.
So what makes you so sure that we are interested in your opinion, I hear you ask, why are you bothering?
And there is the funny thing: as Karate instructors, people seek our council – often in matters not related to martial arts. I’ll illustrate this with a story.
Shortly after Helena and I moved to New Zealand, we attended a summer camp in 1997 with a Karate Master called James Sumarac (8th Dan). I really liked the guy, he was a switched-on cookie in my opinion, very modest and humble and very skilful – Helena and I got on extremely well with him and we picked up a lot of great ideas, techniques and approaches, some of which we still use today.
He was of the Ichikawa school of Goju Ryu – very self defence orientated and he had also incorporated a lot of Tai Chi into his training, realising and examining the very close links between Tai Chi and Goju Ryu. By Tai Chi, I mean the real stuff: the martial art, not this new age dance that so many people think contain moves that intrinsically and magically provide the answers to good health and long life.
At the end of the camp, he provided us all with a demonstration of a Tai Chi kata. It was a long kata from the hard style of Tai Chi which contained both fast and slow movements. I am not easily impressed but this was really good. I was emotionally moved when I watched him perform – he had astounding mental focus in his moves and he clearly knew and felt exactly what he doing when he moved.
After the demonstration, he was asked if we could all go outside by the lake so that we could take photos of him posing – he agreed. When this was over, he asked anyone if they had any final questions before we broke up. One of the students, a large and very fit looking South African guy in all seriousness asked him “What is the meaning of life?”
I could see that James was absolutely gob-smacked at having been asked the question, but James answered him respectfully with an anecdote, the details of which I have long since forgotten.
So why was James asked this question? Why do people seek our council especially when we are some of the least qualified people to give it? Why do people even in the west have this view of Martial Arts Masters as being wise old beings that have special serenity and a monopoly on the answers to all life’s problems?
If you look at some of the older Martial Arts films to come out of Hong Kong and China, the dubbed words “Master” can often be heard. I am still unclear as to whether they mean Master to mean person who has mastered his/her techniques, or Master to mean person who has complete control over what others do and think – many western and eastern instructors today obviously think it means the latter and behave as such.
I have researched a bit into the possible history and culture that may answer this phenomenon and I have a couple of possible explanations:
At first I thought that the elevated status was due to the fact that Martial Arts teachers had better than the average knowledge of the human body due to prolonged studies of how to inflict hurt and as such were regarded as also knowing how to heal – thus often taking the position and status of healer, or doctor. I can find no evidence to indicate that this was the norm at all.
My other theory is that students usually started training at a very young age, often having a life long relationship with their teacher who they came to regard as a surrogate father figure and therefore it was natural for the student to consult his/her teacher in matters not related to Martial Arts – this may also be partially true.
I think that the real reason is simpler – many teachers are natural leaders and people respect leaders.
But the truth of the matter to all you budding Martial Artists is that instructors are ordinary human beings who have the same problems and concerns that you do. They can like their food, booze, smokes, female or male company and they even smell when they take a dump! Don’t look to them to solve your problems – they are simply facilitators of your own martial arts learning.
I should imagine that there have been a fair few Martial Arts teachers who have been quite troubled over their often unfounded high status, the supernatural rumours and the legends that they must have heard about themselves.
On the other hand, it never ceases to amaze me how an ordinary Kiwi (New Zealander) who has probably never even been to Japan can turn into a screaming samurai (complete with Japanese accent) as soon as he/she dons his/her gi. Naturally this applies to many other westerners, not just Kiwis.
The point is that a lot of people can relish the adulation that they can receive from students and even people who do not train martial arts. Their superiority as a human being is almost taken for granted and without question - they can say almost anything they like and very few will challenge what they say.
Why this is so would make a very good topic for further research.
It would be easy for me to ridicule people who put black belts and other masters on a pedestal but the problem is that I did it myself (big time) and I really do have to laugh at myself – they must have laughed at me inside, quietly smirking at the humbleness and the heaps of respect that I made sure that I showed whenever I approached them. Hell, I may well have bowed at them if I had met them in the streets – I hope not, but I can’t rule it out!
Teachers that do accept this pedestal position (and some do revel in it) put a lot of pressure on themselves to live up to this status. Some train fanatically as a result in order to ensure that they never or very rarely loose when sparring their students whereas others almost never perform in front of their students (sparring or otherwise) for fear of revealing that they are mortal.
I go out of my way to dispel the myth of superior status at our club – I hate being called Sensei, we try to keep ritual bowing and ceremony to a minimum and we also try to keep Japanese terminology to minimum.
It works for the most part, but not completely. Some people just will not let go of the myths.
As I wrote above, I am an ordinary person. I try to demonstrate, perform and spar with my students and I do make mistakes and I do loose at sparring (not infrequently either). The question students should not ask is “Why is he/she not as good as I thought he/she would be?” The relevant question should be “Does he/she have the competence to make me as good as I want to be?”
We all have our good days and our bad days – performing karate is no different.
Ok then, why Martial Arts? If my journey in martial arts is not going to lead me to superhuman status, if all this is a myth, why not pick table tennis or football instead?
Good question – does one preclude the other?
If approached “correctly”, Karate, Martial Arts can be regarded a science rather than a sport. It can be a journey and a relationship that can last a life-time and the lessons that are learned in that journey can find application in other aspects of your lives. In this article, I have tried to highlight the lessons/opinions as they crop up and will try to discuss them further at the end.
Can Martial Arts actually provide me with a sense of balance, harmony and inner peace? How can something that is on the face of it so violent actually make me a better person?
These are questions over which I have pondered a lot and I believe that I am beginning to understand them to some degree.
I believe that people are born with an almost default low sense of self worth, self esteem and a feeling of inferiority. When you are born, everybody is bigger, better, stronger, wiser, funnier and more popular that you are. The degree to which these feelings subside depends a great deal upon your parents and your upbringing.
In very many people, these feelings never leave completely and can form the roots of inferiority complexes, fear and intimidation that are the cause of so much disharmony in this world. It is certainly a major cause of bullying endemic in our society: from kids bullying other kids at school; to employees bitching about each other in the work place; to bosses abusing their power; to the haves not sharing with the have-nots - all the way to the extreme end of the bullying spectrum with despotic leaders inflicting atrocities on their citizens.
Victims of bullying often take on a demeanour that attracts more of the same and this can be a very hard cycle to break.
There are no quick fixes to any of these problems but a possible key to making you feel better could be the day that you put on your white belt and enter the dojo for the very first time. You will feel clumsy, uncoordinated, un-fit, out of place, intimidated by all those around you who are obviously superior and who you look up to and you will start practicing your drills.
After a few months you may have graded to red belt or to yellow belt and you will glance sideways at the other that are better than you and you will continue to look up to them and say – I wish I could do that. But you will also glance at the other side and see the new white belts who are glancing sideways at you and you will realise that, hey – they are looking up to me?
Months have a habit of turning into years and years into more years and you will continue to progress. As you progress you will realise that more and more people are looking up to you – they wished that they were as good as you.
In the training Journey, you will pick up on a number of things, and you will experience a number of things that will shape you:
In the beginning, you will find that there are certain things that you can do: you pick them up quite quickly and master them quickly – these things can be a lot of fun, especially when you see a fellow student struggle so pathetically at them. Conversely, there will be “things” that you find impossible, you’re not even close to getting it and the more you try, the worse it gets and the stupider you feel – these “things” are no fun at all, especially when your fellow student seems to have no trouble at all.
You recognise these “things” really early on and the temptation is to not even attempt to get good at the “things” you can’t do: gloss over them and work really hard on the things that you can do – really shine. In fact, if you really shine at those things well enough, people may not even notice that you can’t do the other “things” at all.
Wrong – if it’s in the syllabus, it’s there for a reason (especially if I have written the syllabus). One problem is that you know that these “things” you can’t do exist – even if you have camouflaged them well, or managed to suppress their existence even from your own conscious memory. They will come back to haunt you and may even turn out to be a show stopper when learning new techniques for a higher grade where it is assumed you could do your “things” really well by now.
When you are eventually forced to tackle your “things” and put in the hours and eventually do get it: my god what a feeling, what a sense of achievement! The feeling is actually far better than the feelings you get from becoming good at the things you found easy to learn.
Back to the martial arts context though, everyone will recognise one of these difficult “things”: bug bears – it may be splits, it may be press-ups, it may be that stupid turn or jump in that kata, it may be that bunkai that just won’t work.
It may hurt, it may be boring and you may feel that you are getting absolutely no where and never will. But if you make a habit of chipping one chip a day off a rough rock – it will eventually turn into a statue…(or a very small rough rock).
Martial arts also forces you to tackle are phenomena called fear and intimidation. They are well known to martial artists as many start training because of inferiority complexes resulting from regularly feeling intimidated and being afraid – of course, there are many that don’t have such feelings at all and just don’t start any form of martial arts (they continue with their rugby, or their rowing or their mathematics or chess etc).
Fear is an instinctive emotion that is a survival mechanism and is a warning to us that our survival skills may be imminently called upon. The symptoms are the racing heart, the sweaty palms, the dry mouth, a flushed skin colour, the dilated pupils and sometimes even the shakes.
These are all the bodies natural reactions to adrenaline and endorphins that the body produces in preparing for fight or flight and if you take the time to examine truly how you feel during one of these episodes, you will discover that you have an incredibly heightened sense of awareness and when the danger is over (phew) and you breathe a deep sigh of relief – the feeling of relaxation is just great. Hey, what a buzz!!!
For some reason, our society has attached great shame to displays of fear – who likes a coward. The people that sneer the most are the ones that secretly know that they would have reacted exactly the same way.
I wish I could be like him/her – they have absolutely no fear at all. They are what heroes are made of. If I was like that, I would have many more friends, much more success with the opposite sex (or same sex ;-) for that matter), my career would take off – all my problems would just go away!!
If they truly didn’t feel fear, they would lack the body’s early warning system and its ability to prepare for flight of fight and they would have been the first to get gobbled up by the awaiting pack of predators in the days of old – this is natures way of rewarding the stupid: is this really what we want? – No not at all.
Many people ask me, what’s it like to be able to walk the streets at night and not feel in the slightest bit afraid? How the hell would I know?
I believe that individuals that truly don’t feel fear are very rare and I truly wouldn’t want that. What you can do is to learn not to be paralysed by fear. You can recognise how your body and mind are reacting but learn to function despite the strength of the feelings.
When you get used to feeling fear, you will also be able to mask the outward signs of fear so that they are not advertised to a potential opponent (giving them the very intimidating signal that you are confident of winning against them). But more effectively, you will be able to fake or exaggerate the outward signs of fear in order to give a potential opponent a false sense of confidence tempting them to lower their guard. The surprise and shock that they then experience when you do spring into action can be quite hilarious to watch. We call these things mind games.
This is one of the reasons that we have sparring – yes the dreaded sparring! Apart from being an outstanding way of putting the dynamics back into our martial arts, sparring is our vehicle for learning to function and get used to the feeling of fear. The fear of getting hurt and the fear of making fools of ourselves by displaying that fear.
In our style, we try to give our students the very basic tools before we let them and we judge this to be at around the Orange belt level which normally takes about a year.
Many clubs don’t wait and this can increase the sense of helplessness that the student feels: ten-fold. Some clubs even use beginners as sparring fodder for higher grades, who then take great delight in ripping the poor beginners apart.
The instructor that allows this to happen is an idiot. Is it any wonder that so many beginners quit? You do these people so much harm and you think that you are simply filtering out those that haven’t got what it takes.
My experience is that those that do feel fear and intimidation actually have enhanced survival instincts, better analysis skills and, in many cases: better intelligence. Once they have learned to cope with this fear, they often become better martial artists than those students that you have left as “having what it takes.”
When you first let your students spar, you can almost smell the fear: the fear of getting hurt, the fear of making a fool out of themselves, the fear of loosing and the fear of fear. They are wild, out of control, desperate – very good practice actually for higher grades (as beginners can be very unpredictable) if those people can be trusted not to hurt, not to humiliate but to treat the newbies with utmost caution and utmost respect – their egos are so fragile.
As an instructor, you have to be very careful to build up sparring very slowly and on top of very deep and well entrenched foundations of basics and technique. You have to create an atmosphere of mutual trust, removing the danger (so that students will be able and willing to try out some of the harder and more complex techniques without being punished) and you also have to take out the reward of winning (hence the punishment of loosing).
This way, you will get people working together and collaborating towards each others’ improvement – it is the kind of partnership that really builds people. If you cannot trust your sparring partner, they are actually no good to you at all.
And once you have passed the initial delicate stages of sparring, where there is trust and a high degree of physical control: people may still get hurt (it will be very much rarer). But by that time, the fear will have subsided; the injury will have occurred as the result of an accident; not carelessness and not malicious.
The student will get used to these knocks (and sometimes even breaks) but they will by now be able to shrug them off – the fear of the event is almost always far worse than the event itself.
And by the time that the student has gone through the grades to black belt, that student will not be without fear but will be comfortable with the fear. The student will be able to function, will be able to think and reason quite normally without being in a grip of panic and paralysis. They may even find that the fear will sharpen the mind, improving, instead of hindering performance.
A person that is comfortable with their fear cannot easily be intimidated.
So there you are, finally a First Dan Black Belt after 4-6 years of training: do you remember your first lesson, feeling clumsy, uncoordinated, unfit, out of place, intimidated by all those around you who were obviously superior and you looked up to them all?
Well now everybody is looking up to you – they wish they were you, as good as you, as cool as you and as confident as you. You, in turn, look at the new beginners and think: I was like that once, not actually too long ago – but haven’t I come far in terms of quantity of knowledge.
But you feel oddly disappointed at the same time: you can’t do all the things that you expected that you would be able to do when you were a new beginner (I will touch upon this later when talking about my own journey) and you don’t really feel that different.
You have reached what the new beginners regard as being the end of a journey and you shift your gaze from those beginners and turn in the other direction where you see 2nd Dans, 3rd Dans and higher and you sigh: I wish I was them, as good as them, as cool and as confident as them. A beginner can’t tell the difference between a 1st, 2nd or 3rd Dan etc – they are all an impossible dream, but you can tell the difference: the journey hasn’t ended – maybe it will never end. Oh well, let’s get on with it. You shrug your shoulders, put your head down and go through another evening at the dojo.
You may think that you don’t feel any different, but you do – very different. It is just that those differences have come over time and you haven’t really noticed them as the changes have been slow.
You have gotten used to breaking up huge goals into manageable portions. You have gotten used to achieving. You have gotten used to tackling difficult problems as they come instead of glossing over them or skipping them altogether. You have gotten used to fear and use fear to sharpen your performance: you no longer fear that fear and can therefore not be intimidated very easily at all.
You have actually proven yourself to yourself and therefore have nothing to prove to others (and therefore are less inclined to violence). You are actually learning to like yourself and as such, you are a more benevolent person, more tolerant less aggressive – calmer and more confident: other people’s opinions of you matter less.
In fact, if you were to examine yourself a little more closely at that stage, the most important of all realisations may be starting to form within you: the fact that you are actually in control of your own destiny: the lessons that you have learned in Karate are actually ones that can apply to many other aspects of life, and not just within the martial arts.
So Can Martial Arts actually provide me with a sense of balance, harmony and inner peace? Yes it can, but there are reservations! Big ones!
I am not going to through my entire martial arts life for you now: it has been 30-years at the time of writing (Oct 2003) and would take an entire book itself – hey, what a good ideaJ!
The lessons above are what I call the generic ones, the ones that most people pick up – but each person’s journey is unique and what each person gets out of their martial arts is also unique.
What each student gets out of martial arts is very much dependent upon the club and the instructor – some clubs and instructors are so bad that the people that survive get nothing but bruised limbs and egos: none of the above lessons get learned at all and we have bullies in the making instead of better people. My writing assumes a certain standard of quality at your club.
As a side issue then, I hear you ask, how can I tell a good club – especially as I am a complete novice?
This is a very hard question and sometimes you have to have been at a club for a while in order to be able to tell. When you start getting the bad vibes, you must leave, no matter how much hard work you have put in to your training up till then (bad clubs can be very dangerous) – the hard work won’t have been wasted and your achievements will soon get recognised at another club.
The best advice I have to give is to have a chat to the instructor: if you like him/her (genuinely and unreservedly) then you are half way there. Look also at the atmosphere of the club – is it repressive, is there any hint of bad atmosphere (this can be hard to tell as a beginner – controlled aggression is similar to naked aggression to the untrained eye); are the students good natured towards each other; is the atmosphere relaxed but professional? Strict adherence to an oriental culture can be a very bad sign – especially if the instructor is western.
Ok then, back to the main point of this section – I am going to highlight some of the learnings that I have picked up as a result of my own journey and use these as an introduction to how I have applied them outside of martial arts. This will then lead into explaining how I come to have had the opinions that I have and I will finally end by voicing some of those opinions.
I have wanted to do martial arts for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I read about super-heroes, I heard about things like Judo and I wanted to be these people so much that it burned inside. I was a shy insecure kid, moving from school to school as my parents moved from country to country. Friends came and went so fast that I soon started not to bother to get any.
When I was about 8-years old, we did settle and I got to stay in a school in the south of England. My self confidence was further rocked when I started to develop Psoriasis and I had all the makings of becoming a really introverted character – but I wanted martial arts.
This desire went ballistic when I became absolutely mesmerised by television series called Kung Fu starring David Caradine. This series had in it all that I wanted from martial arts and I started really nagging my parents.
This is how I got to start Judo and I loved it from the word go. Judo is mainly regarded as a sport and is not regarded by many people as a martial art, even by those who are experts in it.
But as a martial artist myself, I regard judo as being one of the very best and the reasons for this are many:
By its clever design, I believe judo to be the only martial art where the participants don’t have too hold back – they go to it full on and the winner is actually the winner. This cannot be done in other martial arts – you have to pull back otherwise participants would kill or seriously injure each other. The winner is therefore a matter of judgement – the winner is always the one how looks as though they would have won had it been for real.
Judo players have a different relationship to their instructors who they regard more as coaches. As a judo player, you ask your instructor why this throw, this hold, this strangle or this arm-lock doesn’t work in practice and you will get the answer – have you tried this, or have you tried that. You will then go and try the advice next time you spar and will either say, yep: that worked or, nope: that didn’t work either.
You actually have to know why something works in judo – it simply isn’t good enough to mimic other people because everyone is different and you have to know what actually works for you.
As a Judo player, you will continually refine, modify, change and experiment until your stuff actually works – if you don’t, you will keep on loosing. In judo, right is the stuff that works whereas wrong is the stuff that doesn’t.
In judo, you always question your instructor and you never believe anything they say without trying out and it works.
Not so in karate or any other martial art. It is often not good to question your instructor (it should be). There is definitely a right and a wrong way to do things (bullshit) and you are discouraged from experimenting, modifying, refining and changing – how dare you question the wisdom of the elders!
In Judo, you know things work but in Karate: you are asked to trust that things work: you can’t really go and try your stuff out because you would end up killing or seriously hurting people (I am talking about the bunkai – the applications in the katas) – but how do you really know that the moves were correct in the first place and the answer to that is that you don’t; and they probably weren’t.
I didn’t know any of this when I started karate at the age of 16. I had already been training judo for 6-years and continued to do so another two years after starting karate. I trained judo between the ages of 10 and 18 and these are very difficult years to learn judo. The problem is that you have very little strength and bulk at those ages and therefore everything that you do has to be almost perfect in technique to work on people bigger and stronger than you – and almost everybody is bigger and stronger than you as you grow up.
When I started doing karate, I was the bane of my instructor’s lives as I would always ask why? Show me? Are you sure? That doesn’t make any sense to me at all! As an experienced judo player, some of the techniques they were suggesting I knew very well wouldn’t work in practice and I would say so.
The answer I would get would be: shut up, that is how grand master Higaonna has explained it – it must be right. In fact, the most common phase heard in our dojos at the time was: shut up Guss, just do it ok!
But I had to know why things worked. It was too ingrained from judo (probably also from my nature) and I had to know exactly why things were wrong – I just had to understand in order to do it.
I eventually got answers for most things, even if I sometimes had to work it out for myself when nobody else knew. I got to also know that there were two kinds of people doing martial arts: those that mimicked without questioning and those that had to know, like me – the former are by far the most common. The great advantage of being the latter is that you get to make up, develop and refine techniques: you are quite comfortable critiquing accepted ways of doing things and you get to piss a lot of people off: people who believe that ancient knowledge is beyond criticism.
Judo is also a superior martial art because it is such a close range skill. You get to feel other peoples balance and intentions literally by the sense of touch at your finger tips instead of having to rely on your eyes. And you get it for free as a bi-product of what you do. Karate and other martial arts have to use very complex drills such as kakie or pushing hands exercises which you have to practise to an extreme level of skill just to get as good as judo players who get that understanding as part of their package (although it can be a little tricky sometimes to translate those skills from a grappling to a largely striking paradigm but once you understand the very slight differences in concept – it is not too bad).
Also, Judo teaches ground fighting skills like no other martial art. As most fights will end up on the ground, this skill has almost limitless value.
The thing that really got me into karate at the age of 16 was this business of chi.
I was 16 years old and had just left grammar school to start 6th-form college: a new environment, new friends and a new chapter in my life on the way to adulthood. It took a few weeks to get the feel of the place, get orientated and start to gather together sets of friends.
Martial artists tend to find each other somehow and truly enough, two of my best friends became a guy called Julian Fletcher, who trained Goju Ryu Karate at the local club called the Bugeikan, and a Chinese guy called Wa Kwai Lam who trained in the Preying Mantis Style of Kung Fu with his family.
Although we certainly didn’t mix exclusively, we met quite often and swapped techniques and Ideas. Julian and Wa came to train at my Judo club, I went to train at Julian’s karate club and Wa came round to my house to give special instruction in Kung Fu. The year was 1979.
I really loved what I was learning from these guys as it seemed to be a lot closer to my original source of inspiration: the Kung Fu series with David Caradine, than Judo was. On top of all this, my friends spoke a common language that I had no understanding or knowledge of at all: they talked about Chi.
When I questioned them further on this subject they explained that chi was an external force existing everywhere in the universe and permeating all living things. It entered your body through a spot in the forehead and gathered in a place one inch below the navel called “Tanden” in Japanese or “Tan Tien” in Chinese. From there it circulated around the body through the acupuncture lines in time with your breathing.
So what is this chi thing good for I asked them? The answer they gave me blew me away completely: Chi was an incredible power that some people learn to control to such an extent that they can produce enormous strength, completely separate to muscle strength. Chi masters could become impervious to pain and injury; could harm others by disrupting their chi flow through manipulating pressure points. Some masters could even do this without touching them using an art called Dim Mac.
Practitioners of Chi could also cure people of any disease or injury by freeing up their chi blockages – the cause of all illness.
I had been brought up in a medical family and my education had given me a fairly good knowledge for my age in physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. Up till that point, I had had my feet fairly firmly planted on the ground and my response to all this was “Bullshit!”
Wa shrugged his shoulders and said that my response was typical of westerners but his culture had used this knowledge for many thousands of years, and was the major foundation of Chinese medicine.
I really liked Wa, he was a very nice person, cool, calm, very popular with the girls and did very well at school. Had I been missing something all my life?
Julian said that he would prove it to me next time we went to karate training – he took me up to the Sensei (Rick, a 5th Dan) who hadn’t spoken to me once since I had started and told him to explain everything about chi to me. His reply was simply that chi was something you either believed in or you didn’t. I said “I believe, I believe – when do we start learning it?” His reply was that chi developed naturally through karate training and most people got the hang of controlling it by around brown belt.
Rick’s word was all the proof that I needed. I was absolutely sold and committed myself to training for life – I wanted this thing called chi very badly.
We talked about chi a lot. Julian himself claimed that he had only gotten to the stage where he could feel its flow but could not control it. Wa hadn’t given it much thought as it had always been an unquestionable part of his family because of his culture. His uncle was a preying mantis master and a healer with a great knowledge of Chinese herbs etc.
As the months went on, I became fluent in chi speak. I read a lot and I trained diligently. Karate was slowly taking over but Judo was still my main sport. Eric, my Judo coach was really sceptical about Karate: Karate was for poofs; Judo was the only thing for real men!
Julian was also very interested in the occult and we talked a lot about that as well. I read a lot about everything and now that I had been introduced to chi, my mind was “free” to believe almost everything – there really were no limits at all. Good and evil spirits, astral projection, telepathy, telekinesis, spells, curses and fate were all powers waiting to be harnessed by me: all I had to do was train and be patient.
Wa confirmed many of these things as belief in spirits was such an ingrained part of his culture and he had attended spirit weddings within his family etc – I really felt sorry for the western world for being so unsophisticated and ignorant.
Books such as the ones by Eric van Lustbader to me were fact, not fiction.
I continued to train hard, eventually leaving college, leaving England for Sweden where I met my future wife Helena. She was fascinated by all that I had to tell and started her own martial arts training together with me in 1982. We trained the 5-animals form of Wu-Shu under a Chinese master called Louis Linn. We saw great feats during demonstrations where he put his fingers though two house bricks, or where he did a backward foot sweep through two concrete blocks. For me, these feats were further proof as to the existence of chi and, therefore, everything else I had discovered.
After two years in Sweden, Helena returned with me to the south of England to continue our tertiary education (I studied Optometry and she studied Travel & Tourism). We returned to my old karate club at the bugeikan and continued our journey.
I renewed my contact with my old friend Julian who by now had gotten into the Chinese occult and was being mentored by a Chinese medium in London who was happily taking Julian’s money on a regular basis.
Some of the things that he talked about and demonstrated scared the living shit out of me. One thing in particular that he showed was how he could meditate and invite spirits to enter his body, inducing epileptic fit type reactions. I even had a go.
Helena was quite pissed off with all this – she was much more sceptical than I was and thought that we were all being very childish.
Our journey continued: we graded, we competed, we saw all sorts of demonstrations, we took part in demonstration. Some of the demonstrations that we saw were demonstrations in chi, or breaking and sometimes the two were connected. Eventually we got to brown belt – the grade at which I had been led to believe all those years back that I would be starting to get a handle on chi.
But I wasn’t getting a handle on chi. I felt absolutely nothing. I must have failed somewhere along the line, I must be inferior somehow – I trained harder and decided that I could do nothing but be patient. I continued to read all that I could find and I learned to distinguish very quickly if the books were genuine or not as if the books gave any hint of scepticism, I would shut them and stop reading.
Kevin, our karate instructor (who had long since become a personal friend of ours) kept telling me that there was absolutely nothing magical about chi at all – it was all mechanics. At first when I heard this, I thought “Poor bastard”, his ignorance is limiting his true potential.
But other things started to support this view for me. I was nearing the end of my optometry education and was really quite knowledgeable in fields such as anatomy, histology, pharmacology, pathology, physics & mathematics (especially in the areas of optics and light) and what I was learning was provably correct. And it didn’t support my other world that included mysticism and chi – a real conflict was taking place inside me but I was learning to separate my worlds hoping that a link would become apparent later – I was able to live with this duel belief system for many years.
Black belt came and went. No, let’s not gloss over this part – we trained fanatically for our black belts. By the time that we took the grading, we had an elite level of fitness; we were very flexible (able to do splits in all various directions); our katas were good; our bunkai worked and our sparring was very reasonable.
Despite this, once the initial euphoria of achievement had subsided, I was left feeling strangely disappointed. I still didn’t have a handle on this chi business – I had no magical powers at all: something that the martial arts business was very actively suggesting existed (in books, in films and certainly in the conversations conducted within dojos).
Helena and I moved to Sweden and we started our own clubs. I taught my students of the existence of chi, but I was unable to demonstrate its existence in any way – a fact that gave me quite a severe martial arts inferiority complex especially as chi demonstrations were quite common place at other club’s demonstrations.
As Helena and I climbed the Dan grades, and we got chatting to other instructors, we started being privy to how some of these demonstrations were done. They were all tricks & illusions – even the breaking. At first I thought that ok, these guys at least are fakes, not the genuine article but as time went on and we got to know more and more people: I started to realise that I may have been duped from the very beginning.
I started to pick up the sceptical books and bit by bit, my alternative martial arts world started to fizzle out and slowly disappear. At first I felt really stupid – I hadn’t just fallen into a trap: I had jumped into it with both feet and had chosen to ignore all evidence to the contrary. But I was at last starting to grow up and better late than never.
This didn’t happen over-night: it happened over the course of a number of years. I read books by Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking: I started to painstakingly try to pick out and sort out my view of the world as well as my view of martial arts. I was learning to think as a sceptic, a scientist, a naturalist: building up a filter that filtered out the background noise of false wonder leaving only true wonder – of which there is plenty.
My increased understanding and knowledge of how the world (or universe) really works slowly enabled me to dismiss subjects such as chi, alternative medicine, spirits, UFOs, religion, telepathy, telekinesis, astral projection, tarot cards, and ghosts: in-fact anything and everything paranormal. The consequences were quite profound.
Ditching chi was interesting as Helena and I were forced to revisit our karate syllabus and remove drills and exercises whose only reason for existence was to promote chi. I also started to approach the our tuition and the new syllabi on a basis much more akin to the way I had learned Judo. If it worked it was in. If it didn’t work, we would try to modify it until it did work – if that wasn’t possible it was out.
Eventually, we were left with a no-nonsense syllabus that we could really build upon and it has formed the basis for our karate ever since. It was a very painful business at the time as so much of what we had learned had to go and we were wondering if our entire martial arts journey hadn’t been a very embarrassing waste of time. It took us a while to understand that we actually hadn’t lost anything at all through this process, we had actually gained a lot and our own development has since gained a speed and direction which otherwise would not have been possible.
Many people have expressed that fact that they feel so
sorry for me for not believing in anything, that my world must be so black
and white, so boring and clinical, so devoid of hope and excitement.
Admittedly, I did feel very empty at first – was this all there is to the world? Is there no real meaning behind our existence?
But, unless you have been down this journey, it is hard to explain the freedom and clarity of vision that scepticism can provide. If the background noise of untested claims and beliefs can survive the bombardment of scepticism, it becomes true wonder worthy of every expense in its investigation.
There is also an incredible feeling of freedom knowing that your life is whatever you make of it. It is very rare that your actions cannot influence and steer what happens to you.
If you don’t like yourself – change. If you don’t like your life – change it.
In the end of 1996, Helena, our two sons Jake & Sam and I left Sweden for New Zealand. We felt that we wanted to see more of the world. All our belongings were crated and shipped out by sea, while we flew out.
We were very excited with the prospect of a new life in the paradise of the South Pacific and my enquiries had led me to believe that gaining registration to practise as an Optometrist would be relatively simple: sitting some theoretical and clinical examinations to prove my competence and off I go.
This was not the case. The New Zealand medical and semi-medical world operates within a very closed-shop structure and it soon became apparent that I would not be allowed to sit any exams, I would not gain any credits recognising my past experience and qualifications to gain a New Zealand recognised degree – I would not be able to practise as an Optometrist in this country.
We spent a lot of money on lawyers challenging this and a significant amount of time lobbying MPs in order to gain their support to change this ludicrous situation – all to no avail. I had effectively lost a profession that I had spent considerable effort building up and we were totally devastated. What the hell were we going to do?
It was then a year since we had arrived in NZ and I had great trouble getting any job at all. We scratched a living through Helena working as receptionist and me getting temporary jobs working as a low paid Optical Technician.
We continued to train Karate and opened up our own club in the beginning of 1998 which turned out to be a success from the moment that we opened our doors, a fact that incalculably boosted our morale – we were wanted after all.
A lot of people build up their identities through their careers. Ask anybody who they are and the majority will say: I am a Salesman, I am a Teacher, I am a …but this is not really who they are.
In our case, martial arts has given us an identity that is not reliant solely on our careers and it has given us a self awareness in terms of who we really are and what we can potentially achieve.
We were left with a number of choices: quit New Zealand, return to Sweden and continue where we left off; go back to university in Auckland and redo the entire 4-year optometry degree; do nothing, accept a career building upon skills that were recognised at the time or go back to university and re-educate in a direction that would mean a complete career change.
After much consideration, I chose the last option and sat down to review what I could possibly do in Hamilton (so that we would not have to move once again and shut down our club as a result).
In the end, I chose to do a degree in Information Technology. It seemed like a huge mountain to climb as I could barely switch on a computer – I was most definitely a white belt in the subject. It seemed at the time to be absolutely the hardest alternative.
I threw my entire soul into the project (which I could not have done without the unfailing support of my family), concentrating hardest on the areas where I was weakest. Using every available opportunity to attend summer-schools and cramming as many papers as I could, I managed to compress the three-year degree into two years.
Karate training became very useful as it provided a physical vent for all frustrations and fears and allowed me periods where I could completely unplug my mind from my studies and concentrate on something else. Training was very cleansing in this way and served as a constant reminder that, hey – I can do this. If I can get a black belt, I can certainly get myself a piddly little degree!
During this time (1999), Helena and I were given the opportunity to be graded by a Karate New Zealand grading panel. We were given only 7-weeks notice and put ourselves onto a training regime like none other we had experience previously. We were very nervous as we had never been graded outside our own organisation and we were not at all sure how our no-nonsense interpretations of our Karate style would be received.
We pushed ourselves to the limit of our physical endurance and when the time came to grade, we were pretty knackered! But, we felt confident that what we could do was a true representation of what were about as a Karate style.
We were so tired that we didn’t have any energy left over to be nervous on the night and we both managed to pass our grades, Helena to 3rd Dan and me to 4th Dan. The feedback that we received was tremendous with comments like “flying colours” from the head of the grading panel. They particularly enjoyed our Kata applications – the bunkai. It was tremendous to receive national recognition of this sort and we felt true vindication for the path that we had chosen for our martial arts.
Eventually, I graduated in June 2000 and I landed a good job as a Systems Analyst for a large hydro power company. I had my first Dan in IT.
After a while in the role, I reflected on this Karate analogy and thought to myself – 1st Dan is not the end, it is a beginning – so where do I go from here? This was how I came to the decision to continue studying for my Masters degree part-time and it is how I have come to the decision to continue studying all the way to Doctorate. There is simply no reason to stop. Helena is also planning a similar course of study.
Exactly why it is that physical confidence can lead to confidence in other areas in life is very strange. Perhaps it is a hang-over from the times when physical confidence directly equated to survival.
But personal confidence, I believe, is not by any means solely reliant on physical confidence. If we use the buzz words of harmony, contentment & inner-peace etc which are words often used to sell martial arts (and really don’t have much measurable meaning); I think the whole thing revolves around self-actualisation or personal development.
Karate, as in any other martial arts, is simply a vehicle by which this can be achieved. It is therefore a process and not a product. It is about looking into a mirror and liking what you see and not just in a physical sense.
If part of what you don’t like is the overweight reflection, or the unfit reflection then any physical activity/dietary awareness is going to fix these problems.
If part of what you don’t like is the easily intimidated reflection with a perceived big fat yellow stripe painted down your back, then martial arts is a good vehicle for addressing these issues. But most sports will do this for you too.
Part of joining a club must be the social interaction and gaining friends with which you have your club’s activities in common: being part of environment where you are not known as a fellow employee, a boss or a university student etc – you are yourself.
If you can be part of a club that treats martial arts as a science; where you can experiment and try out what works for you; to have a frank and unhindered exchange of ideas, discoveries and philosophies then you are on to a winner.
But be very wary of the martial arts club that borders on you accepting established ideas as a pseudo-religion.
Many of those of you that know me will realise by now that I hold some fairly strong atheist views. I have read the bible several times; I have read the Koran, the Torah as well as some Buddhist and Taoist works and for me all religions are superstitions based on ancient mythology. Understanding the cultures and politics dominant at the time that these works were written is of paramount importance to understanding what they are actually trying to say.
Don’t accept other people’s interpretations of their meanings without attempting to get an unbiased view yourself – find out – study! If you don’t do this then you are accepting burdens of guilt and shame: all with an unproven promise of better things to come when you are dead.
I thoroughly recommend the following readings:
It is my belief that without religion, people would take far more responsibility over their own lives, the lives of people around them and the world that we live in: for we are a species whose survival depends upon co-operation.
If we just focus on Christianity, there are literally thousands of different sects and factions who believe whole-heartedly that their interpretation is the only correct one and that all others are sentenced to an eternity of suffering.
When taking a step back and studying all the other religions as well, there are far more similarities that differences.
I have been very heavily criticised for my opinions on life, religion and martial arts but I would plead with you to gain a greater understanding of what is known and not known in Science. It is astounding and wondrous.
Martial artists, believers in the supernatural & paranormal, believers in religion, believers in alternative therapies etc often bandy about theories of conspiracy of science against their particular belief sets.
Yes, scientists are human beings also. They make mistakes, they suffer from embarrassments over these mistakes, they have pride, they may cover-up some of their mistakes and they also have their preconceptions.
But science is not a product either: it is simply a discipline for gaining, testing, evaluating and understanding information. There is no conspiracy.
In this age of information, we are increasing overloaded by it. How are we supposed to be able to tell the difference between information, disinformation, misinformation, science and pseudo-science? The answer is education. Educate yourselves – equip and empower yourselves!
I have chosen martial arts as my vehicle in the journey of life. But it is not the only one – I have also chosen education, community activities, pursuit of experience, my friends and my family. Together they form multiple strong foundations upon which my identity rests.
Remember that strength; flexibility; speed; looks and health are all temporary gifts. If your martial arts depends on these then your vehicle will disappear from under you.
Understand the technique, the thinking and the science behind your martial arts – enjoy your journey and good luck.
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