Anything Less and You Will Die
Lately, through conversations with Grand Master Perkins and observations in our Guided Chaos self-defense classes, I’ve begun to notice a disturbing trend, one which can lead practitioners of the art down the wrong path toward the “Dark Side” so to speak and that is the tendency to “play” at self-defense or what I call “Gaming the Game”. This is where practitioners, rather than focusing on developing a set of skills that will help them survive a real life and death encounter, focus on developing their skills only for the sake of winning a duel or contest within the confines of the class setting.
This way of thinking is not only foolish but can prove fatal in a real fight to the death. As we continually state over and over, it all starts with your mind set. Without the proper mind set, no amount of training, no matter how well taught or developed, will help you because above all you must have the will to use your skills to their fullest. Anything less and you will die. It really is that simple.
For those who attend our regular classes, most of what I’m going to say here is old news, although from my perspective we don’t hear it enough. I probably won’t be making any friends with this one. No matter. In this news letter I will focus on what you should be thinking about in your training and hopefully, if nothing else, you will come to understand “What Guided Chaos is Not!”
Plain Talk About True Horror Beyond Your Imagination
Anyone who has attended our seminars (especially the women’s seminars) will be quite aware that when it comes to making people understand what we are up against we pull no punches. So I will once again speak plainly as to the true horror of a real street attack.
You see in the real world, unlike what you may think, the true nature of violent crime is much worse than you can possibly imagine. When people get jumped the bad guys rarely interview you. Usually they just come up on you if your guard is down and pummel you and then either rob you or stomp your skull until your head becomes a big sack of gravel. And if their friends are around they are more than willing to join in on the fun.
When you hear stories about some poor young girl’s body being found in some remote location, oftentimes partially nude, what the police don’t tell you is the sort of condition they found the body in. They leave out the part about how the fiend took out a knife and a pair of pliers and cut and peeled her skin off while she was alive. How their body had every orifice penetrated. How they had their hands cut off or how they were sexually mutilated. Forced to do degrading things, engage in sex with their friends, strangers etc… as in some of the horrific group attacks you may have heard of.
Trust me when I tell you, no horror film or Silence of the Lambs-like movie with all its gore and over-used cliches can even come close to the pure horror of the real thing. And no amount of begging, no amount of money, no sexual favor, “nothing” will get you out of such a situation if you are subdued prior to the act by the human monsters amongst us. This is why we implore people to not go to crime scene number two. For the benefit of our newer readers, what is “crime scene number two?” After they’ve already stopped, mugged, assaulted you or whatever right where you are, when they tell you “come with me!” or “get in the car!” they’re not taking you someplace from which you’re going to escape or be rescued by the Marines. It will be the place you died or wish you died to make the pain stop. I can assure you that they have nothing less than your rape and torture in mind, be you male or female. I could go on because unfortunately there is no end to horrific examples of the evil that men do to one another.
We Mean What We Say
With this understanding in mind it still amazes me that people still are confused by the intent behind Grand Master Perkins’ training methods. People often ask how they can improve their skills, how they can become more balanced, looser and more sensitive and while they will not say it, I think sometimes they walk away disappointed when we tell them the same things over and over. And that is, do the exercises, focus on the principles during contact flow and focus on fighting for your life and not to win a duel.
For some reason there seems to be a school of thought out there that believes that just because we state or describe a concept of fighting in clear unambiguous terms without flowery language that some how there has to be more to it. They think somehow we are holding back information; that we are not telling them the full story. Even worse, from the comfort of their keyboards, they think that they know more about the art than Grand Master Perkins and even go as far as to try to “change” his exercises and concepts as if they’re going to “improve” upon them. They think that through some mental effort they are going to find “the secret” or a “short cut” to developing what they need. Well good luck with that. The Guided Chaos principles are grounded in pure physics and tried-and-true reality and not some intellectual exercise or dojo horseplay. You can intellectualize these principles with all the mental masturbation you want but the core physical truths, forged by actual life-and-death violence, remain the same today as they have been for our ancestors over thousands of years of human warfare and violence.
Folks, I have to tell you I’ve been doing this art for nearly 20 years and have trained with “all” of the Masters, so harken to what I say: There are no shortcuts outside of the basic exercises and principles of Guided Chaos. However, at least in my view, I think that people want to believe there is more to it than what we say. I believe it is because their minds just can’t accept that, given all of the various fighting systems in the world, that very, very few even remotely discuss the importance of balance, looseness etc. and if they do it’s more or less just lip service or they do not have the slightest clue as to how to develop them.
They think that if something is that simple that it can’t possibly be effective. I always have to point out the obvious and that’s because simple is the reason why it works. Remember: Truth is simple; lies are complex.
So, when we say what something is, really, that’s exactly what it is!
Enough on that.
Real Fighting Is Nothing Like the Dojo–So Get Over Yourself
“In a boxing match I can win by points. On the street I have to knock everyone out.”
–Jack Dempsey
One thing that I think needs to be cleared up because I think it gets lost in real estate investment turkey the sauce is that when practicing, people often tend to miss the importance of Contact Flow. [Contact Flow is a completely free-form sparring drill]. Once again, for me, Contact Flow is not just an exercise but the place where I work to ingrain the principles of the art into every fiber of my being so that if and when I have to go into action I can do so without thought or hesitation to the best of my abilities.
I also try to focus on the type of movements that make up the dynamic motion that best represents the utter chaos of a real fight and not some weird fancy nonsense based on a reality of fighting that does not exist in the real world. This is why it is important that in the beginning you work very slowly so that your body can develop the proper body unity and movement dynamics to deal with the multitude of possibilities that you may encounter in a real fight. Obviously you cannot have an answer for every possible position you may be in but the idea is to cut down on the level of uncertainty in the split second you have to fight for your life.
As a final note on this (because I also believe that this is often misunderstood) I need to clear up the confusion over when I am instructing people and when I may have to fight. You see there are two things here: one is what I refer to as my “teaching game” and the other is my “fighting mind set”. The two are not the same nor how the skills are applied. When teaching people I as well as the other instructors have to move in a manner that allows the person that we are working with the ability on some level to “feel” and “follow” what we are doing. This is done so that as we “guide you” in your development you have something to work with. If we just go out and pummel people all of the time they will not develop and all they will learn to do is get beat up and demoralized. This doesn’t mean that we will not hit people, because we will, it is done in this fashion so that we do not work so far above those we are training that they can’t learn.
However, my fighting mind set as well as the other instructors of the art is another matter. Let’s just say that the level of authority and focus within the hitting dynamic are on two totally different levels and are as different as getting hit with a wiffle ball bat versus an axe handle. For those more advanced students who have worked on this level you know exactly what I am talking about. However it takes time for students to develop their skills to the point where we can hit them with authority and hit each other without fear of seriously injuring each other and even then we are not hitting with all of our might otherwise we would kill each other, literally.
