“True philosophers who are burning with love for truth and learning never see themselves . . . as wise
men, brim-full of knowledge . . . For most of them would admit that even the very greatest number of
things of which we know is only equal to, the very smallest fraction of things of which we are ignorant.
Nor are these philosophers so addicted to any kind of tradition or doctrine that they suffer themselves
to become their slaves, and thus lose their liberty.”
William Harvey, English Physician

One of the reasons I study Wing Chun and honor the system is because of its clear logic and scientific rigor. While they may not have called it the scientific method when they were developing it in China, by the time it reached us in the West, after passing through the hands of Western-educated Ip Man and Western-boxing enthusiast Wong Shun Leung, it had been subjected to a great deal of filtering and design modifications which fit very well with what we call the “scientific method.” My observation is that the most successful practitioners of this art are the ones that hew most closely to these ideas, which include testing hypotheses and practicing skepticism. I’ve found looking at the system through this lens has helped me achieve more and more clarity.

I appreciate those teachers who have followed Harvey’s definition of “true philosophers,” who never see themselves as complete, who understand the many things they don’t know, and who stay free through their skepticism and constant condition of student.  Certainty in martial arts is stagnation in my opinion.  We have theories which are in need of constant validation and which need to always prove themselves true for today.

“Bushidō is in being crazy to die. Fifty or more could not kill one such a man”. Nabeshima Naoshige

Preparing for violence is one of those “Catch-22” situations.

You’re trying to learn how to avoid violence, but have little experience.

But you don’t really want to go out and get experience, right?  So you have to find a workaround, something that is proven to be useful.

I looked into how cops prepare.  These are people, especially in certain specialties and locations, who can be reasonably certain of experiencing the real thing.  How do they prepare?

In Deadly Force Encounters: What Cops Need To Know To Mentally And Physically Prepare For And Survive A Gunfight, Dr. Alexis Artwohl (behavioral science consultant to law enforcement ) and Loren W. Christensen (Vietnam vet, ex-cop, and Eastern martial artist) detail their recommendations for police who wish to prepare intelligently for extreme violence.

Unsurprisingly, the big problem is dealing with fear.  The surprising thing is its mostly the physiological effects that are out of your control, aka what your nervous system does in your body when it perceives a life threatening situation.

Its a weird area, because you have to start talking about the brain as two different entities.  There’s “you,” the conscious actor, and then there is the rest of your brain, the unconscious process, doing its own thing in the background.  But these unconscious automatic parts of your brain are “intelligent” too.  This part of the brain is watching and listening to the same sights and sounds “you” see and hear.  The information coming in through your senses follows two paths.  The faster path runs through your amygdala and other ancient parts of your brain.  This part of your brain will evaluate the information based on very old assessments going back to the African plains.

Is it a snake or a spider – JUMP!!!!

This part of the brain is jumpy and paranoid and when it gets startled, it will cause many effects in your body.  This is the challenge of a modern person in a dangerous situation.  You need to use your higher brain and keep yourself under control while affected by the intense physiological symptoms of fear.  Or, more precisely, what they call a state of arousal of the sympathetic nervous system.

The Autonomic Nervous System is made up of two parts, the parasympathetic (which controls low arousal states) and the sympathetic (which controls high arousal states).

I first heard about this stuff in Lt. Col. Dave Grossman’s books.  While the information is slowly being processed by the prefrontal cortex (basically the conscious “you”), your body is already responding according to ancient scripts.

“When you perceive a threat, the sympathetic part of your ANS will kick in and your body will start to experience a high arousal state.” Some people enjoy this feeling. This is the rush from jumping out of a plane.

When we are in fear of our lives, a whole host of sensations and physical responses might occur.  These are the effects that cops have to control when in a gunfight or dealing with a knife wielding assailant, as in the video clip below.  They are trying to calmly deal with the threat, while they have a pounding heart, trembling, rapid, shallow breathing, dizziness, nausea, sweating, dry mouth, tingling in limbs, the urge to urinate or defecate.  Tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, time distortion, dissociation.  Automatic behavior.

Automatic behavior is what they call it when after the fact you say, “it just happened.” My gun appeared in my hand and he was dead. My hand hurt and he was laid out on the floor in front of me.

How do we prepare for all of this?  It helps if you anticipate it will happen..

A “deadly force encounter” for a civilian will almost always happen unexpectedly and will involve people who are probably irrational and volatile

The only way to prepare is to rehearse. You really can only rehearse by using your imagination. This is where Stress Inoculation Training comes in.

In Deadly Force Encounters, Artwohl and Christensen break Stress Inoculation Training into three parts, the first of which is the most important: conceptualization of the stressor.

You have to run through scenarios in your head and rehearse what you would do.  I suspect this is the reason for Walking Dead’s huge popularity.  The news makes people anxious.  So many of us are instinctively drawn to entertainment which helps us visualize dangerous scenarios.  What would i do if…?

So the best thing you can do is accept the reality and likelihood of fear and stress responses in these situations.

Expect it will happen. You may freeze. You may piss yourself. Whatever.

Practice controlled breathing. Practice visualization.

In this clip below, the poor cop does not want to shoot this guy, but the man seems suicidally determined to force the cop to shoot.  This is so common they call it “suicide by cop.”   Note the cop wisely keeps this guy at the 21 foot foot limit.

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“Bang is the…beginning of an ambush. Bang is what we want to prevent. Being left of bang means that a person has observed one of the…warning signs…Being on the other end of the timeline is referred to as being right of bang … military operators and law enforcement personnel … learn skills and techniques that rely on someone else taking the initiative…waiting for the enemy or criminal to act first. Unfortunately, whoever strikes first possesses a powerful tactical advantage.”
Left of Bang

“Most people…don’t allow their intuition to guide them…when something isn’t normal, watch out.”
Left of Bang

I’m interested in survival and keeping myself and my loved ones safe.

While I don’t take it as far as others — I don’t have a bunker with months worth of food and water — I wouldn’t mind having a close friend who maintained one – hopefully they would let me and my wife in if the Zombie apocalypse went down!

In the news and in history books, there are riots, terrorist incidents, and wars and I think, how could I avoid that? Did you see The Impossible, the film about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hitting a Thailand resort?  I think, what would have been the best way to avoid that?  To survive that?

I’m what you might call a low-level survivalist.

While I don’t have a compound in the woods, I read books and articles.  I watch movies about wilderness survival (like The Edge and The Grey) or the Zombie apocalypse (like Dawn of the Dead and Return of the Living Dead).  And then I think, what would I do?

I also read books about military strategy and psychology.

My studies have led me to this conclusion — a large percentage of people who encounter danger in the modern developed world stumble into this danger through carelessness and a lack of paying attention to their environment.  Most importantly, they don’t listen to their instincts.

This was the big message I took away from a classic book on this subject, The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker.  De Becker is a security expert who detailed in his book many case studies of violent crimes (rape, assault, etc).  The common thread in these stories was that the victims knew something was up, yet ignored their instincts.  They had various body sensations and premonitions but didn’t trust themselves and didn’t want to do something even slightly socially awkward to avoid the danger they sensed.  Rather than be rude, they pushed down the feelings and placed themselves in danger.

In Left of Bang: How the Marine Corps’ Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life, the book describes the Combat Hunter program, developed to create training which would put enable Marines to be more “tactically cunning on the battlefield,” allow them to develop “increased situational awareness,” and ultimately to become more “predators than prey” in environments like Afghanistan and Iraq.

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