Mood:
mischieviousNow Playing: porn
I was having a discussion with my student the other day about concepts. This has caused me to re-evaluate the commonly accepted understanding of concepts and how they apply to martial training. While many things have appeared self-evident to me, I often realize that there are flawed concepts which are supported by translation problems and the Malice of those who wish to be better than others, no matter the cost.
Bruce Lee taught that the most important aspects of a Martial Art were it's concepts. His Books used many quotes from other, better, books to illustrate the importance of concepts. Every Master teaches this irregardless of the art. In fact, this is what turns training into a martial art.
Every art has a purpose. The purpose could be enlightenment, combat, healing, protection, or any social interaction with all their variations. The concepts are the pattern which combines training aspects into a cohesive whole. As such you can't "Combine" concepts. You must have one concept. All other concepts must be looked at as different facets of the same jewel. Anything else will cause the training to conflict with itself. Like physics, in order to develop more advanced understanding, any understanding must encompass all previous understanding.
A sample concept, for discussion, can be "All things are one half of a duality." This concept is pretty big. We can shrink it down with semantics to apply to combat. "Every strength has a weakness" is a good example. Through this we can guide our training. Because every strength has a weakness, we can begin to look at strengths and weaknesses of different techniques. Many people are willing to point out that a stable posture lacks mobility. They ignore that mobility lacks stability. While both concepts are oversimplified, and therefore flawed. They can still lead training toward skill.
We will use blindfold sparring, or blind-fighting, as an example. If you are in a stance, opponents tend to try and get behind you. The obvious reason is to attack without being seen. The easiest way to simulate this is to wear a blindfold. As your training partners step in and perform an attack (hopefully one at a time) you would focus on the concept that someone is fast, or skilled, enough to move out of the visual field and attack from surprise. This would allow you to explore the fact that you always have a weak area and a strong area. Hopefully you would build up the capacity to move your strengths and weaknesses around. This would help to define those weaknesses and strengths so that you could do two things.
1. You can predict the targets. If the opponent steps behind you, you will be aware of the most likely targets when you consider the attacks you have already witnessed.
2. You will respond by moving an appropriate strength to defend an apparent weakness. It stops the problem where people tend to walk into punches and kicks which have surprised them.
What nobody does is take the blindfold off and maintain the awareness of strengths and weaknesses. The ability to lose track of an attack and predict the most likely target. This is the purpose of blind-fighting. It is possible to use the blindfold to develop awareness but there are more effecient ways to build those skills. The blindfold simply simulates a lack of visual awareness and forces us to use the other senses. When that is achieved, the blindfold comes off and other levels are introduced. These levels are related to how precise the concept becomes defined and how deeply it is understood.
If every strength has a weakness then creating a weakness will cause the creation of a corresponding strength. The question becomes "how do you define strength and weakness and how does this fit into your concept?"
