How? Could you share more of your thought on this?
I still don't understand how can MA training has anything to do with "be a better person".
When I
- throw a groin kick, my opponent drops his arm to block it, I then punch on his face.
- pull my opponent, he resists, I borrow his resistance force, change my pulling into pushing and take him down.
- attack my opponent's leading leg, when he steps back, I attack his other leg.
- throw a jab, when my opponent tries to block it, I pull my jab back, and throw his a cross.
- ...
Before I have trained MA, I was a honest person. After I have trained MA, I like to cheat. The more that I have trained MA, the more that I feel that I just make myself to "be a bad person".
Would you agree that tools often have more than one purpose? The same hammer that can be used in war, can be used to build a house. The same knife that can be used to stab, can be used to prepare a meal.
When I attempt to think more deeply about the techniques I am training, it often leads me to thinking about the reasons why a technique works, both the physical and psychological reasons. This can lead me to a better understanding of why we fight, and also how to use that to my advantage both inside and outside of the arena of martial arts.
We have our Codes of Karate, which have been passed down, with mistakes no doubt, over the years. I think about what they mean and how I can apply them, and often find they have more than simply martial aspects; they have universal truths behind them.
Let's take one of them that happens to be my favorite. "A person's unbalance is the same as a weight." What does this mean?
Taken at face value, and only considering martial aspects, it means that if a person is off-balance, they cannot respond quickly or correctly to an attack; it is as if you gave them a bag of sand to carry and then hit them as they struggled to control it.
And this is true. The human animal has an innate desire to remain upright, it's a survival mechanism. If you take away a person's balance, even slightly, the primitive part of their mind takes over and makes regaining balance their highest priority. They will not defend well, nor attack, while their innermost mind screams that they are falling and must do something about it right now. You might as well have set them on fire.
This applies to the larger non-martial world as well, I have found. I do not like to have my psychological equilibrium disturbed; none of us do. If a person disrupts my inner peace, my instincts guard up and try to regain that without regard to whatever else they might be trying to do. By understanding this and addressing it within myself, I can avoid having my equilibrium stolen; recognizing a thing for what it is often takes away its power. For example, riding roller coasters does not produce a thrill for me; I know how they work and how my body is intended to respond, so now it doesn't do that. I may have lost the enjoyment of riding roller coasters, but it was an experiment; I took away the fear, and in that manner, lost the ability to be thrilled by it.
The world has more than one, surface, aspect. If a coworker says something to me that I find objectionable, it may not be what he or she said that matters, but what their intent was in saying it. I learn to not react to strong words immediately, but rather to try to understand why it is being said, and what the problem actually is. Very often, I find an accusation is actually a request for assistance, born of frustration, and said in panic. If I take the words at their surface meaning, I lose the ability to discover and help fix the problem, and merely contribute to rancor.
I learned this from studying kata. Kata has so many more than one layer, as many know. We perform a particular movement in a kata, and we have a 'surface' understanding of what it is intended to do. This is a block, this is a punch. But over time, we are taught or discover that there are other applications which work (also many which do not, but this is something we learn by testing). The bottom line, however, is that things are not always what they seem on the surface, that there are layers to the onion that we do not discern if we do not study the kata deeply and with a probing mind and willingness to learn. Some call these 'secret teachings', which they are not. If they are occulted, it is merely because the student hasn't reached the level to see them. Some students never do, and that's OK. I do not think you ever get to the core of the onion, there are just more layers.
You think a lot about your martial arts patterns and movements; you post about them all the time. You have good insights and observations. What if you also thought about why these work, and what they might affect in the greater world outside of martial arts? Good martial arts practice depend upon balance, speed, power, breathing, timing, understanding tactics, correctly interpreting attacks, anticipating attacks, working towards a goal, and so much more. These sound like good things to work on my every day life as well.
I am not a philosophy-spouting TV martial arts character or a master at anything, let alone martial arts. I am an old, slow, fat man who is getting older and slower as time passes. I simply enjoy thinking about the why of karate, and then trying to see how that fits my inner life, my interaction with people as a whole, and figuring out where I fit into it all. Layers of the onion. A hammer is more than one thing.
