World Of Swords

Whap, bam and yippee! We eye the big screen, and we see kung fu flips all over the place in the Matrix movies and we watch pai mai sword standing and grown up girls eye gouging in Kill Bill and we know we have seen the real masters! Smell the coffee, dude, that's a a bunch of actors, and what the real masters have done would put those cinema heroes to shame.

Gichin Funakoshi is considered a pivotal karate master. He brought karate to Japan, and thence to the world. If that isn't considered feat enough, why don't you go stand on a rooftop during a hurricane and hold a sheet of plywood?

That's right, to make his stance totally immovable in every way, he battled the very elements, and word has it he never sailed off to Oz. And, if you want one of the older masters, try Sokon Matsumuri, an Imperial bodyguard of old Okinawa, who made a bull run away just by giving the bull a serious stare. The trick was that he went out to the bullpen during the dark hours and jabbed a pin smack in the middle of that old bulls nose!

Of course you may not think the intelligence to figure out how to best a bull without bashing him is not much of a deal. So try something that doesn't take much intelligence, like grabbing the beams of a ceiling, not hooking the fingers over, but just grabbing them, and hand walking across the ceiling. This is something that people were doing in old Okinawa just for kicks!

My favorite old karate master is Mas Oyama. Mas had this little trick of chopping the horns off bulls, and he ended up killing three of the poor brutes. Now, that was a while ago, and we certainly don't want to talk about killing poor animals, but the muscle, the intelligence, the brute strength, and the sheer artism required to kill a bull with your bare hands! I wouldn't try it if I were you.

Okay, you've heard enough of the tales, so let me give you a simple trick to do, and you can start being your own legend making master of Karate. Learn a karate form, something like Bassai would be great, but you might want to start off with a simpler form like Pinan One. Now, take the garden hose and run it for an hour on that bare patch of earth in the backyard.

Now, the ground is wet and soft and mushy and messy. So it is time to practice that karate form you just learned, heh heh. Whap, bam and Yippee!

Your feet go over your butt and your face plants in the mud. Up on your feet you lazy good for nothing! Did you think the Karate masters of the legends would whine just because they got a little mud on their face?

Al Case has studied Karate, and shaolin and a lot of other arts, for 40 years. A writer for the mags since'81, he is the originator of Matrix Martial Arts. You can find out about his training methods, and even get a free ebook at Monster Martial Arts!

In part one we discussed that a person has to know something, and not just in the general monkey see monkey do attitude of the current crop of so called masters. This article has to do with the second and even more important lack upon the part of todays masters. This article has to do with the amount of knowledge a master has.

Yes, a fellow can study a martial art and say he has mastered that martial art, and people might even fall for it. He can get so good at the art of karate, for instance, that nobody can even come close to beating him. That, however, isn't going to result in him really becoming a master.

To be able to destroy somebody using a particular martial art is very limited in scope. Destruction, you see, is a very short sighted thing. While there can be an art to destruction, the true martial art is one of control.

How do you control somebody? You must learn more than one art, and this means you must learn both the destructive arts, and the arts which espouse control. You've got to learn force and flow, which is another way of saying you must be able to bash something, or control it.

Destroy something and it is no longer around. This means that you have no more authority or power over that. True mastery is a perpetuating state whereby you can sustain your power and authority over your subject even into the future.

In the first article I said you had to know something about the technology of something. In this article I am telling you have to know the technology of everything, and one other thing. I am telling you that you must have power and authority even over those unreasoning and strange things called people.

Having power and authority over not just things, or an art and all its moves is not enough to make somebody a master. You must be able to have power and authority over people. You must not just know the moves of an art, you must be able to apply them at any time and any place over any person.

Now, having defined what a true master is, consider those individuals who lay claim to being a master. Can they just destroy and hurt people, and especially their students? Or have they studied and can apply a wide range of arts, without the necessity of hurting anyone, to anybody at any time?

Al Case has analyzed martial arts 4O years. He began writing articles in'89, and had his own column in Inside Karate. He is the originator of Matrixing Technology, which you can find out about in a free ebook offered at Monster Martial Arts.

There is a tremendous amount of interest in Matrixing Technology. It is pretty obvious that Matrixing is going to be the next big thing in the martial arts. It is pretty obvious that Matrixing is going to sweep the world and transform the martial arts.

To explain why this is going to happen, let me say a couple of things. The first is that Matrixing does not make any martial art wrong, it makes every single art it touches better. The second is that the purpose of matrixing is to align the information of the martial arts, to make it logical and easier to learn.

Now the actual and defined purpose of matrixing is to analyze and handle force and direction. To understand this is to understand that every object in the universe has a direction. And, collision is the point at which the various trajectories of the objects intersect.

Thus, the point of matrixing technology is to control the paths of objects so that collision is avoided, or at least for one instead of against one. In the martial arts this becomes the singe most important thing in the martial arts. In fact, a little matrixing and you understand it is the core concept of all martial arts, and life itself.

Joe Blow throws a fist at you, or a spear or a foot or an elbow or a body or whatever. You analyze the route that the weapon is following, and you can handle it. If you do not accurately analyze the path of the weapon, poor you.

How do you ascertain that you have the correct trajectory analyzed? By knowing what all the potential trajectories are. Only if you have assessed the trajectory by all the potential trajectories can you determine that you have selected the correct trajectory to handle.

So matrixing is a method by which you can analyze all the trajectories, and thus select the correct one to handle. And, by matrixing, you can analyze all of your potential responses, and be assured that the one you choose is the best one. And, here is the real key, matrixing enables to discover trajectories that you did not know existed.

That's right, to discover what you don't know, and this makes you the ultimate pioneer, the ultimate explorer. With matrixing you have the key to discover all the dark, secret mysteries that are obscured and hidden, no matter if you are studying uechi ryu or parker kenpo or that esoteric form of silat. Beginners in Tae Kwon Do will learn faster, wudan tai chi chuan students will uncover the ancient mysteries, and even the bash and trash experts of the ground and pound arts in MMA and UFC will find themselves enlightened and uplifted.

Al Case has taught martial arts 4O+ years, including several systems of Kenpo, Karate, Kung Fu, Pa Kua, Tai Chi, and more. He is a writer for the magazines with hundreds of articles and a column, and he is the originator of Matrixing and Neutonics. You can sample Matrixing Technology by getting his free ebook at Monster Martial Arts.