I know that those people who have never trained with the likes of Vladimir Vasiliev, Konstantin Komarov, Sergey Ozhereliev, Vadim Dobrin, or the recently deceased Mikhail Ryabko, or some of their best students, all seem to think that Systema is fake and nonsense, but the reality is that I do not know of a single human being, regardless of their prior knowledge of martial arts, that has trained with any of the people I mentioned above that did not leave there thinking something like: “How the fuck did he just do that to me?!”
And I don’t know of a single person that has trained with them that thinks Systema is fake, or ineffective, or not able to kick the hell out of pretty much every other martial art I am familiar with given a comparable level of training in a comparable student. Yes the videos all look absolutely fake, but that’s because you don’t understand what you are watching. Systema drills are NOT meant to be realistic attacks. They are supposed to generally be either realistic movements in super slow motion, that can gradually progress in speed and intensity but only as long as the practitioners do not go into a state of “tension” that is fear, or desire to win, etc, as such emotions translate in telegraphing movement and stiff/tense movements that become easy to counter or take advantage of, or, drills meant to give you some discomfort and train you to breathe and move through them retaining a relaxed mental and physical posture, while performing whatever move is required to evade or overcome the drill.
I did karate-do in a very hard dojo for years and I was already a second Dan when I met my first Systema exponent in a training context, Val Riazanov, and I couldn’t touch the guy at all and he could do what he wanted with me. Similarly, after I became a Systema instructor I had everything from Boxers to ex-SAS to active soldiers asking to take me on in a more “realistic” way to test if it was all nonsense. Although I do not profess to be anywhere near the level of the exponents I named above, in every case, they very quickly decided I was absolutely not full of shit. This also included a couple of guys that had 20-30kg on me and worked as bouncers or bodyguards and had serious training in wrestling or other martial arts, I forget which, I think Krav Mama and some karate etc.
Anyway, the point here is not to try to brag, not about my skill, nor about Systema itself. The point is that the benefits of Systema go far beyond merely fighting or combat.
In some 3 decades of karate and delving into other martial arts from time to time, to test them, and myself, I had accumulated a variety of relatively permanent injuries. Impacted joints, an injured sternum which had also caused a semi-chronic stiffness in my spine on one side, various scar tissue that had accumulated from various muscle tears and so on. In my mid thirties I started to do Systema and by my early 40s I was healthier and fitter than I was in my thirties. Many of the injuries I had sustained re-presented themselves as I trained Systema then healed, almost miraculously.
Besides all of this, it had a profound effect on my psychology. It is a little know or acknowledged fact, that our connection between mind and body is far deeper and more important than literally any doctor has ever imagined, never mind spoken or written about. The training that you do in a martial art has a profound psychological effect too. Karate-Do is a hard style, and while the romantic theory behind Shotokan Karate-Do is that there is “no-contact”, the reality is that even in competitions, body shots are permitted and head shots are supposed to be “limited” but I had events where the opponent’s fist went past my head to the elbow, meaning if I had not dodged the punch he was trying to put his fist through my head. And in dojo kumite (the “friendly” sparring that happens in the dojo outside of any competitions) pretty much anything goes. You can literally bite a guy’s ear off if he doesn’t submit and no one will chastise you for it.
As a result, the mindset it fosters is a very rigid one. Flexible perhaps in how to go after a target, but the very idea of giving up is anathema. The ruling principle of Karate is: Failure is acceptable, but giving up, never.
In short, you can succeed or die trying. Nothing else.
Systema philosophy instead can be summarised as: Do the impossible, and survive.
Hence in Karate your value is zero. The mission is all. Honour is all. Death is irrelevant. Surrender or giving up is simply not an option.
In Systema your value is total. Win, achieve your goal, overcome impossible odds, but above all, survive.
After I had trained a few years I went to visit my brother in South Africa, and he noted in me a chance that surprised him to the point that he mentioned it out loud after a single day with him.
“What did you do man? You’re like a different person. A lot calmer, even if no less intense.”
I told him about Systema and as a result he went to do some of it with Vadim Dobrin, and I dare say that what he learnt with Vadim, saved his life at least once if not more times.
But now that I have passed the half-century mark, I do not burn with desire to lay out random street thugs, as I did in my youth, when I purposefully would walk around at 3 am through the parks and supposedly dodgy areas of London hoping for some unfortunate thug to pick me. That all said, if trouble comes looking for me, I am not exactly at the wheel-chair section of the “old-fighters” line.
However, I have realised that my lack of Systema specific drills for the last few years is something I need to change again and get back into training my body with those same drills and so on, because the benefits far outweigh the mild discomfort or time it takes to do them. In part I realised this thanks to rather strenuous pruning activity by climbing up and down trees for over a week. While stiff at first, thanks to doing the movements in a Systema way, several aches and pains have left me, and the more serious ones, the result of an injury from my stupidly lifting/shoving a 200kg or so stove into and out of a car by myself, have become more prominent. Which means either I need to see a good chiropractor first and then do the Systema training, or at least do the training. Again, the benefits I highlight are physical ones, but the psychological ones are really probably far more important.
Sylevester, the young guy who came to help me for a week has read my Systema Book and he was explaining to me how doing so had already helped him level up in his jujitsu class in a way that his training buddies couldn’t make sense of. It’s also helped him begin to understand his body and a muscle injury he had in his leg and shortened fascia he has in his feet. It was genuinely a pleasure to see a young man, learning such things so early in life and noticing how beneficial they are to him, but too the attitude he has fostered, which I am sure had its own inborn talent of course, but can only have been helped by the Systema training he learnt from the book, was really quite rare to see in someone that is just over 20 years old.
At one point, one of the branches he was standing on in an olive tree broke off underneath him and he simply fell to Earth as naturally as if he had chose to jump instead of been surprised by a suddenly broken branch.
These are the things you cannot prepare for and that Systema training gives you without you even realising it.
So, I shall begin to train again regularly, even as I continue to do a lot of physical work on the farm, as is required during spring.
I hope those of you who read here will also try to take an interest, as it truly is a beneficial system for your body, mind and soul. The recent sponsorship of the trees, forcing me to say more prayers, together with physical training to limber me up more, is truly quite a wonderful and life-affirming thing. I hope you try similar things in ways that work for you.
What Next?
There are three paths I can go down with respect to the next book I write.
NAZI MOON (linked) is now available at least in the US and CANADA and should be available soon in other countries too.
I have been asked to do the relationship book by friends and men in general for years; at least 20 of them. I resisted the impulse* for at least a couple of decades, primarily because, as one of my alter egos/nicknames —given to me by friends in Italy over 20 years ago— said in one of the graphic novels he appears in: “Any man that says he has understood all there is to know about women, is either a liar or insane.” And it’s close enough to the truth in some ways. Nevertheless, I feel that after two divorces, a lot of women in between, and finally a proper Catholic marriage, not to mention 4 children I fathered, I have probably made —and persevered!— and (one hopes), learnt enough that it is probably acceptable to pass on a few pointers to younger men; at least on those issues I feel I have now got enough experience to retroactively note when I did the right thing (regardless of outcome), and when I did the wrong thing (again, regardless of outcome). I mention this, because as I say, there have been a lot of people asking me for this for a long time.
With regard to my non-fiction, each book I have written so far, is really mostly a compilation of my theories and conclusions formed with many years of experience.
The Face on Mars was the result of a lifelong interest in Astronomy from very early childhood. I understood what a light-year was at age four, thanks to an uncle who was, and remains, a total geek to this day. He also sent me a telescope in my early teens, with which I observed the mountains of the moon, and how the moon itself moved. I also saw Haley’s comet with it, from our home in Africa at the time. And to this day the concepts I put forth in that book were then, and for the most part continue to remain today, unique. Some have badly plagiarised aspects of it (hello Graham Hancock) but the overall main issue had not been understood by anyone I am aware of before I saw it. And most remain totally ignorant of it, despite the predictions and theories I made back in 1995, playing out as correct in the intervening time. The update in 2014 also added a new dimension to the reality of my ideas, which is partly expanded on a lot more in my fiction work.
Systema was similarly, a book I wrote after I had personally spend decades in the martial arts world. And I wanted to demystify a LOT of the nonsense that goes with many martial art “concepts” and their related egos, and which —in particular— seemed to have a vortex of “mystic ninjas” concerning the Russian system. Which is an impression many martial artists might have if they have not experience of it firsthand. By merely watching YouTube videos or hearing “fantastic” stories of almost magical ability, they are most likely going to assume it is some woo-woo nonsensical “martial art”. That thought is disabused within minutes of confronting any of the top exponents of it. Unfortunately, as always, along with the really good practitioners, there were also a lot of “mystic ninjas” and some of the practitioners did nothing to demystify the situation, so I did it. I have been doing martial arts since I was a very small child, thanks to my dad, so I had pretty extensive knowledge of it before I put hand-to-keyboard after almost four decades of it.
Reclaiming the Catholic Church was in some ways the “odd man out” because I had a road to Damascus Event in 2013 and the book came out in 2020, that is, only 7 years later. However, I had been reading different books on all the main religions, mysticism, “spiritual” and even New Age stuff, again, since my teens, and literally infiltrating various cults as a hobby, in order to see if anyone had anything that was demonstrably true, real, or worthwhile. I had settled on a basic Zen-Agnosticism, with a clear understanding there must be an intelligence behind creation (the math, astronomy, biology and physics, as well as logic, pretty much confirms it many, many, many times over) but no sense of a God as such that was specifically interested in us mere mortals, much less me specifically. That changed in a radical, unexpected and utterly surprising way, that while “subjective” in the sense that I cannot prove it to anyone else, was absolutely objective and very much so for me. The other part that helped was that because the Catholic Church has ALL of its rules and dogmas written down, it was fairly easy to follow the thread of its history and see the astonishing truth it is founded on. As it was, to see that the current inhabitants of the Vatican are, without putting too fine a point on it, flat out Satanists.
BELIEVE! Instead, published a year before RTCC, was a much smaller work, putting out my new, or updated, basic outline philosophy. For those who have read both books, you will notice that BELIEVE! is not even a fifth of the size of RTCC, at just under 100 pages, and is a lot more open with respect to overall views and concepts. RTCC was the follow up that basically said, “OK, so that’s sort of where I am with respect to religion as a whole (BELIEVE!) now let’s take a look at this one path that I state is the best one I can see so far, and in this book, (RTCC), I went full autist, covering every aspect of Sedevacantism (i.e. the actual, current, only Catholicism left) and demonstrating it in a manner that no one has so far even attempted to refute, much less succeeded. The result is that RTCC is the foundation on which BELIVE! is really sitting on, which is probably why even if a much smaller and less detailed book, BELIEVE! has resulted in now over 100 people converting to Sedevacantist Catholicism (aka simply: Catholicism).
The reason I point all this out, is because in these last two non-fiction books, it becomes obvious that even my overall looser and more generic ideas, as expressed in BELIEVE!, for example, clearly have had a lot of genuinely positive effects on people who read them. And we know it was this that sparked the results, because BELIEVE! came first, and yet, even without all the details (presented in RTCC), it had a serious impact on people’s lives.
I see a LOT of confusion, struggles and heartache among young men today concerning intimate relationships and finding the right woman.
I literally get questions, emails, or messages on the topic to a frequency that is starting to become hard to keep up with. And as anyone that reads my blog knows, I have a rather low opinions of PUAs, and would very much hate to be mistaken for one. That said, I know for a demonstrable fact that my advice benefits these younger men, because they are getting married, having babies, and resolving issues they had for many years of their lives. I have literally had everything from friends, neighbours and even strangers, asking for advice, on an ad hoc basis, to hypnosis sessions with people that were under clinical care as supposedly paranoid schizophrenics under medication that went on to stop the medication (yes with doctor approval and full knowledge of my sessions with them) and go on to have a productive life with a functioning relationship, when prior they were 29 year old virgins. And I have been doing this for at least 15 years, with positive results.
So, perhaps, there is some utility in putting together some of the baseline concepts concerning male-female interactions and so on.
The other options (SF saga continuation) or YA SF books are, respectively, more a divertimento for myself and, a less fun, but I think helpful addition to the current dearth of adventure stories for boys mostly. I am not aware of anything like the Hardy Boys and so on coming along anytime recently, which is why Castalia House is doing well printing old classics. I would not enjoy writing such books as much as my own adult Science Fiction, but it would not be too difficult to do and they should be able to be produced fairly quickly. Although, I am not likely to be acclaimed as a children’s author anytime soon, or even long after I am dust, so the effort might not be worth it.
Anyway, I’d appreciate your thoughts on the matter, so please feel free to leave comments after you vote, thanks.
* Vox, on this post, referring to someone else, Taleb, in this case, said something that holds true for most of us. Personally I have always genuinely tried to resist the temptation, and often people have been quite “deflated” when trying to make me their “guru”, when, after being asked something I know little or nothing about or at least I don’t feel qualified to take a stand on, I simply say “I have no idea”. Some were quite insistent nevertheless and I always consciously dissuaded that, as I explained in some detail in my book Systema: The Russian Martial System.
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By G | 12 December 2023 | Posted in Ancient Technology, Believe, Books, Brazilian Ju Jitsu, Catholicism, Christianity, Face on Mars, Hypnosis, Increasing Happiness, Karate-Do, Martial Arts, Nazi Conspiracies, NAZI MOON, Overlords of Mars - 1, Overlords of Mars - 2, Poll, Reclaiming the Catholic Church, Relationships, Relationships, RPGs, Sedeprivationism, Sedevacantism, Social Commentary, StCZA - Module 0, StCZA - Q.O.R.G., Systema, Systema, The Dirty Old West, Writing