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Martial Arts as Training for the Rigors of Psychonautica

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amor_fati

amor_fati

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Psychonautical practice can take its toll on the sedentary mind and body, and though it sometimes has its own way of whipping the spirit into shape, one would do well to expedite the process. The martial arts are of the few athletic activities so closely tied to the raw spirit of the individual and so conveniently practiced in various locales (to include one's own abode) with little to no human or other resources (though these can be quite helpful).

For most, local training establishments are far from satisfactory or appealing and quite expensive, but the martial arts are about mastery of one's own person, which cannot be achieved solely--or to any great degree--in the the gym. The practice of the martial arts also inspires activity beyond what is directly pertinent to combative form by demanding greater and greater physical and mental prowess on the way to self-mastery.

The information age has provided us with an abundance of accessible resources, to include those pertaining to the martial arts. This thread is intended to share such resources.


There are six volumes to this, all six can be found in full, here: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNzU2MTg3Mjg=.html
[YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]

[YOUTUBE]

This playlist contains an excellent series detailing the majority of the world's martial arts:
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=D2D575AC423A9170[/YOUTUBE]
 
Always stretch before you spar.

Never bow to your opponent face down,
unless you WANT to get kicked in the face.

Great thread, the martial arts are a very important practice.


Close your eyes,
stand in front of a soft mat or grass
and have someone push you down randomly both forwards and back.
Learn to roll with your hands to keep your head and body out of harms way.

Enough times, and you will always fall like a cat, and never hit your head!
(Tae Kwon Do taught me this, BMX+skateboarding proved this trick to be VERY effective!)

There is no better way to release anger/aggression than kicking the shit out of a hanging punching bag, or sparring with someone respectfully.
 
Among the first things learned in MCMAP is how to fall correctly (without injury) and how to take a hit by learning how it feels and by deadening certain portions of your exterior to the pain of impact (like iron-body training). The most important thing to remember in falling is to tuck your chin.

Retraction is the most important phase of a strike, as if the strike is blocked or dodged, you must be ready to intercept the counter-attack.

The importance of the actual combat elements of the martial arts may not seem important to the more spiritual side of the practice for most, but it serves to embolden the spirit and ground the practice in its primal origins as less ornamental and more ruggedly crucial for function as a human-being.
 
Well said! You have such a brilliant way with words!

Another thing
when you strike
KEEYAH!!!!!!

Vocalizing on a hit will allow you to flow much more energy out ;]

Also

DO NOT HIT
HIT THROUGH

You will have a much more effective strike if you visualize going through your opponent.
 
۩ said:
Well said! You have such a brilliant way with words!
[...]
Vocalizing on a hit will allow you to flow much more energy out ;]
[..]
DO NOT HIT
HIT THROUGH

You will have a much more effective strike if you visualize going through your opponent.
Click to expand...

Why thank you!

Bruce Lee was a huge advocate of both vocalization and follow through in the way you describe it, and apart from his own formidable accomplishments and insights, he had an impressive roster of those under his tutelage. He's probably one of the greatest influences in my own pursuit of martial excellence. I'm also heavily influenced by the principals advocated in Bushido and regularly practice wielding a bokken.
 
Systemma has taught me two important aspects of fighting. Never be afraid, and be confident in your own abilities.
This doesn't mean fantasize or conceptualize that you can defeat anyone in battle, but if you are aware and confident in your own physical capability, you will be able to preform to the best of your abilities.

never flinch and always look your opponent in the eyes, you can read their entire body movement in that manner.


fighting is very pure, it's a form of connection to the spirit. i've always believed that the two opposite ends of the spectrum of physical human contact are having sex with someone or beating them to death with your bare hands, and we have some
desire for both in varying degrees to everyone we meet.
:)
i love this place.
 
Martial arts have always fascinated me. From Bruce Lee to Fedor. I just love the feeling of controled fight.
The exercise are also very good for staying in shape of course. Not to forget the subtle principles of tai chi... great way of physical and mental exercise.

Also i am a great fan of all forms of applied philosophy. So strategy has become a way of thinking. The way of the warrior if you like.
I highly recommend 'Art of War' by Sun Tzu. One of my favourite books. Just brilliant..

"The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected"

"All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him."

"Though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays."

"Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated."

I love this stuff :)

Art of War
 
Virola, love The Art of War. I haven't checked it out yet, but I've heard great things about Sexual Life in Ancient China; "This book shows clearly that manuals of love and manuals of military strategy are indiscernible, and that new strategic and military statements are produced at the same time as new amorous statements."
 
ragabr said:
Virola, love The Art of War. I haven't checked it out yet, but I've heard great things about Sexual Life in Ancient China; "This book shows clearly that manuals of love and manuals of military strategy are indiscernible, and that new strategic and military statements are produced at the same time as new amorous statements."
Click to expand...


"There is a book from which one can learn many things, entitled Sexual Life in Ancient China …. This book shows clearly that manuals of love and manuals of military strategy are indiscernible, and that new strategic and military statements are produced at the same time as new amorous statements. That’s curious. I ask myself: OK, how can we extract ourselves, at the same time, from a structuralist vision that seeks correspondences, analogies and homologies, and from a Marxist vision that seeks determinants. I indeed see one possible hypothesis, but it’s so confused … It’ perfect. It would consist in saying: at a given moment, for reasons that, of course, must still be determined, it is as if social space were covered by what we would have to call an abstract machine. We would have to give a name to this non-qualified abstract machine, a name that would mark its absence of qualification, so that everything would be clear. We could call it — at the same time, this abstract machine, at a give moment, will break with the abstract machine of the preceding epochs — in other words, it will always be at the cutting edge … thus it would receive the name machinic point."

Those are the words of Gilles Deleuze. A philosopher i have never heard of before this post lol.
Also i do not quite understand what he is talking about...
I mean... WTF?

What is this 'machinic point' ???
 
I've just been soaking myself in Deleuze recently, and don't have anywhere near a solid grasp of his terminology.

From Wikipedia entry on Desiring-Production:
They describe the mechanistic nature of desire as a kind of "desiring-machine" that functions as a circuit breaker in a larger "circuit" of various other machines to which it is connected. Meanwhile, the desiring-machine is also producing a flow of desire from itself. Deleuze and Guattari imagine a multi-functional universe composed of such machines all connected to each other: "There are no desiring-machines that exist outside the social machines that they form on a large scale; and no social machines without the desiring machines that inhabit them on a small scale."
Click to expand...
So I think that as the ecology that an actor (military state or lover) adjusts to a previously successful strategy [abstract machine?] the actor can either lose connection, or adapt. I think "machinic point" refers to the successfully adapting strategy, where it always maintains contact with the desire.
 
Interesting stuff indeed :d


from that site:
"What does the term “Machinic Point” mean?

I originally came across the term “Machinic Point” whilst reading a talk given by Deleuze, transcribed from a tape recording and published in the journal “Contretemps 2″ in May 2001. The seminar itself took place on March 26, 1973. The excerpt follows:

“There’s a book from which one can learn many things, entitled Sexual Life in Ancient China. This book shows clearly that manuals of love and manuals of military strategy are indiscernible, and that new strategic and military statements are produced at the same time as new amorous statements. That’s curious. I ask myself: OK, how can we extract ourselves, at the same time, from a structuralist vision that seeks correspondences, analogies, and homologies, and from a Marxist vision that seeks determinants. I indeed see one possible hypothesis, but it’s so confused… it’s perfect - it would consist in saying: at a given moment, for reasons that, of course, must still be determined, it is as if a social space were covered by what we would have to call an abstract machine. We would have to give a name to this non-qualified abstract machine, a name that would
mark its absence of qualification, so that everything will be clear. [...] At the same time, this abstract machine, at a given moment, will break with the abstract machine of the preceding epochs - in other words, it will always be at the cutting edge (a la pointe), thus it would receive the name machinic point (pointe machinique). It would be the machinic point of a group or a given collectivity; it would indicate, within a group, and at a given moment, the maximum of deterritorialization as well as, and at the same time, its power of innovation. This is somewhat abstract at the moment, it’s like algebra. It’s this abstract machine which, in conditions that will have to be determined…it’s this machinic point of deterritorialization that is reterritorialized in this or that machine, or in this or that military machine, amorous machine, productive of new statements. This is a possible hypothesis.”

So, the idea behind this site is to create a space where such an abstract machine may exist. My writings focus on current positions within fields which address the notion of what it means to be human, including mind-body functioning, the relationship between mind-body and experience, and ultimately experience and reality. I hope the ideas expressed here shall promote cognitive deterritorialization amongst you, my readership. Engaging a reterritorialization upon newly emergent syntheses [mind, body, world, state, self, other].

I hope you may each, “progressively differentiate” [M. DeLanda] yourselves, via this explorative plan(e) of consistency. As there is nothing other in the world than, ‘the (spontaneous) flow of becoming’. And when returning from my cyberspace to your physical bodies I hope you truly find them the Ultimate Experiential Medium.

“freedom is the surfing of the wave of that spontaneity”. - Bey

- Joseph Jay Haskins"
 

" Deleuze and Guattari see territorialization (deterritorialization and reterritorialization) as the outcome of dynamic relations between physical and/or psychosocial forces (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 67ff.). Territorialization is an active process, whose agent may be human, animate, inanimate or abstracted (society, God, ‘they’), as may the object of territorialization. Thus the force of the sun’s gravity territorializes the earth in its travels through space, acting on it through the exertion of a force. Air blown through a reed is territorialized to vibrate and produce a specific tone, and again into music by the designation of musician and audience upon blower and locutor.

Deleuze and Guattari apply this general conception to the specific arena of how meaning is ascribed within the social relations of human life. Re-reading Marx from this perspective suggests that the capitalist deterritorializes products into commodities, while labour is abstracted, becoming reterritorialized as wages (ibid: 68). Territories and territorializations may be not only physical but also psychological and spiritual: philosophy and ideology have historically reterritorialized land as ‘nations’, Homeland or Fatherland (ibid.). These systems of thought (what Foucault called ‘discourses’) possess authority, and as such may deterritorialize and reterritorialize how we think about the world and about ourselves."
 
“In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world, the human organism is transformed. In this dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself.” - Berger and Luckmann
 
Awesome find! The Embodied Machines page there has an article claiming "a most lucid and informative introduction to some of Deleuze’s most fundamental terminologies and concepts." Thank you!

edit: lolz, you were all over it!
 
I practiced isshinyru for about 7 years. I was to young and undisciplined for it so I did not put in the practice or have the respect for the martial arts enough to fulfill my potential. I really jus tloved sparring and fighting. Very sad. My brother stayed focused and the martial arts became the focal point of his life. He is one of the most balanced, fit, and bright minded individuals I know.

The martials arts can do wonders for a person, and they can be very rewarding. If you give yourself to them fully, they will give back 1000 fold.

Unfortunately the school I practiced at dissolved. The master became less about isshinryu and more about the money. At the end you could never get one on one focus from a sensei that is essential to becoming a good martial artist. I had the good fortune of being there when there were only about ten people in a class. A lot of great martial artist walked away from that school and now it is dissolving, along with the wealth of the two masters who started it. Their greed got the best of them. I could train with one of the great sensei's who walked away from that school because my brother still trains with him, but I moved too far away.

Sorry for the rant at the end, been wanting to vent that for a while.
 
^Sad story. I've always stayed away from the local gyms, due to the commonly apparent lack of character. I do what I can on my own and with the bit of training already under my belt and bide my time until I come across a master worth training under. Don't let anything halt your exploration; it's your body and your life. All anyone else can do is point you in different, hopefully new directions, but unless you get lost or too caught up in one direction, they all begin to converge on the same state of self-mastery.
 
amor_fati said:
^Sad story. I've always stayed away from the local gyms, due to the commonly apparent lack of character. I do what I can on my own and with the bit of training already under my belt and bide my time until I come across a master worth training under. Don't let anything halt your exploration; it's your body and your life. All anyone else can do is point you in different, hopefully new directions, but unless you get lost or too caught up in one direction, they all begin to converge on the same state of self-mastery.
Click to expand...

Wasn't a local gym but I totally get what you are saying. Well, it almost became like a gym at the end. The martial arts for fitness things really bothers me. Sure, that is part of it, but a really small part. The martials arts is about mastery of body, self, and on some levels the mind. Pushing yourself through rigors that you never thought you could endure and doing things that you never thought you could do. Self discipline and confidence. It is a really beautiful thing. It can be like peotry in motion.
On another note though, I love gyms. I would consider myself a gym rat, when I have the time and cash. When I was in high school, if I wasn't practicing for football you could find me in the gym. I loved it when I was that in shape. I miss it now alot, but I plan to get there one day again.

Ohh the life that I dream of. To be free from financial obligations. To work out, play bass, study philosophy, science, history and art all day.
 
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