Something I learned many years ago, in my early 20s in fact, as a result of the intensity with which I pursued martial arts in a very traditional dojo of karate-do in Cape Town, South Africa, is a lesson of psychology and life that I think I have not seen addressed in any detail anywhere.
Succinctly put, it is this:
Something that makes us instantly angry, usually happens so fast that exploding the emotions like a schematic of some engine, is never considered.
What I mean is that if you take the time to consciously go through the steps from start to finish of how you went from neutral or calm to pissed off, very often, you can’t really do it properly.
There is an infinitesimally small space of time where the anger kicks in, but just before that, there is often something else. It is so compressed and so tiny a space of time that it can take real effort to slow the memory of the emotion down enough to be able to take note of it. This is why I make the analogy of a schematic of an engine. It is a bit like consciously taking apart a complicated engine and being very detailed and clear about where and how each part fits with the whole.
In the moment it happens, this process of analysis is practically impossible to do, unless something significant happens to interrupt the instinctive response. For me, a logical sequence that makes the event reasonable can do it, but this rarely happens in life.
Therefore, analysis after-the-fact is pretty much all you have left, and most people are very, very, very unwilling to revisit such events in detail. Especially with a view to self examine instead of blame the outside world in some way.
The intensity of doing martial arts in an environment where real injury is a given if you don’t keep your wits about you, over time, at least for me, and I would say for people who are either obstinate or willing enough to put themselves into harm’s way repeatedly and regularly, is that eventually, you get somewhat desensitised to fear.
From a young age, it was always a natural instinct that anything that made me afraid I wanted to conquer somehow. And it didn’t much matter what kind or type of fear it was.
Eventually, doing enough martial arts, I got to a point that fear of other human beings being able to do me harm was not really much of a concern.
If you take the time to do the self-reflection, you will find some very interesting things about yourself. I found that in my case, anger was usually the result of a sense of injustice. In general this can be true of most people, since anger is often a reaction to a perceived trespassing of some boundary. But I also noticed that at times it was a reaction to fear. The transition from:
normal—>afraid—>angry
was so quick that it took real effort to notice the fear part. In fact, it presented mostly as:
normal—>angry
But it was the nanosecond of fear that was the key.
If a threat presented, the sense of injustice was the result of a fear of being violated somehow.
A potential mugger, violent threat, or even just an uncaring attack in training in the dojo, done with intent to cause damage from someone that did not understand or apply the principles of honourable violence we operated under, would result in a tiny fraction of a second of fear; of being hurt, or someone I cared about being hurt, and then the anger at the injustice of their action towards me or mine.
Eventually, the fear did not present itself anymore once I had been in these type of situations enough times. A kind of slow motion effect allowed me to process the event in real time even as it happened, and then it became quite clear, even obvious at times, the fear of the other person was instrumental in their own actions, quite often. Which in turn allowed a more measured response from me, that is a calmer reaction, which could mean anything from ignoring a perceived “trespassing” even when it might potentially have been quite serious —even to the point of being amused by it— to a calmer and more precise physical response that worked very well and was far more effective because so much more precise.
But the lesson learnt about the internal mechanisms that fear produces was invaluable. And the key take away for me was that fear is always a lie. In some respect or other, fear is always an illusion. I am in fact known for the statement that fear is always an illusion, a lie, for about three decades.
What I mean by this is not that fear is not at times justified, for it can be, but rather that the process of letting fear determine your reaction is counter-productive. In an ideal situation, if you could always react to any situation with a calm mind, the response will invariably be more effective.
The fear response is designed to activate various autonomous responses as quickly as possible, it is a survival mechanism, and therefore an important part of any living creature’s make-up.
If, however, you manage to gradually desensitise yourself to the fear response in various settings, you can learn to produce a correct response that is not any slower than the fear response, but that has the advantage of being a far more balanced one.
Any effective martial art performed at a high level of realism and intensity for years will create some of this. Correct Systema training will be particularly effective at this, and in my experience is far superior to the other martial arts I have investigated for myself in this respect.
But a conscious understanding of this is also very beneficial, and an experiential knowledge of it is extremely beneficial.
For most normal people leading normal lives, the likelihood of them being able to do this is remote, as this level of self-analysis and experience generally comes only from being repeatedly placed in dangerous or even life-threatening situations. Having experienced many of these from early childhood and then choosing them consciously in teenage years and more so as an adult, one can then begin to develop such conscious thoughts, but even then it is rare, because most people who have such life trajectories are on some level survivors of some intense situations and tend to try to avoid such things later in life. Even if they do not, they can become trapped in a process of trying to “harden” themselves for years. A kind of natural response to potential harm if you can’t get away: fight.
In my experience it is a rare fighter that learns the deeper nature of what triggers him and then adjusts and evolves beyond it. Some do it over a few decades of training but even then, it is usually only partial and remains quite rare.
Only the ones that really push themselves to go as deep as possible within themselves do it. Sometimes life circumstances force them to do so, and sometimes their own internal damage drives them to do so, but it is never a comfortable journey, although, in the best of cases, it is certainly a worthwhile one.
If you do manage to essentially wipe out fear, for the most part, you can still be left with what I would call righteous anger, which is just as fast, but doesn’t have the element of fear as the driving factor. It is its own driver; and maybe can’t even be defined as anger really, at least not in its motive efforts and effects.
An example might be a home invasion by violent attackers. It would be normal to have fear for one’s family in such an event. In fact, most people would remain stuck in that aspect of it. My personal response to it, unless it was an active hostage situation before I could even react, is not, however, fear, nor, in the case I experienced, was it anger. I would say it was best described as hyper-concern.
A guy had broken into the apartment I lived in with my then wife and baby daughter of only a few months. My wife had left a kitchen window open and this guy had snuck in and silently hidden in the hallway behind the baby stroller. When my wife woke up, put the baby on the couch in the lounge and went to do something in the kitchenette she had no idea there was a man hiding in the house. This was her routine at about 5am, when the baby woke and although I would wake when she left the room, the lack of sleep in general would make me fall asleep shortly afterwards. When I heard her scream my name, I was in that deep sleep you fall into in the early morning when you’re exhausted.
I remember opening my eyes while still lying in bed, then the next memory is of me pushing the lounge door open. I have no memory of how I got out of bed, opened the bedroom door, went through it and onto the lounge door, nor what I hit with my knee on the way there, as I realised only once the police had arrived much later, that I had a giant swollen bruise on my knee that had dinged the cartilage. I had felt nothing. I did feel it for the next three weeks or so though.
At the moment of pushing the lounge door open, I distinctly recall my thought, which was crystal clear, fully formed and although it had many parts, was absolutely simple due to it’s clarity. For some reason, I expected there to be three intruders on the other side of the door. The lounge of that small apartment was small and regardless of where my baby daughter or wife would be in it, I knew I would get to my daughter even if one of them had already picked her up and had her. The speed at which I was moving would not let anyone focus on harming the baby, worst case she’d fall if I didn’t catch her after dropping whoever was holding her.
I had the entire layout of the lounge in my head and the thing I was sure of was that whoever was on the other side of that door that didn’t belong there would be neutralised without any holding back or reservation whatsoever, and it would happen as fast as possible. I knew I would only require one hit on anyone that was near my daughter. It wouldn’t matter their size or strength. Something I always had inside me in all the fights and physical confrontations I had, including serious ones, was completely gone: I was absolutely free of any restraint in response.
I even had in my head an instant picture of the lounge and which walls, including the tv screen the ones further from my daughter would be rammed into after I took out the one closest to her.
As divine providence would have it, the guy had already jumped over the couch and ran out the side door before I’d entered the lounge. I never saw him and my sense that there was three of them, prevented me from giving chase in case there was someone else still in the house and I’d be leaving my baby and wife with them.
If that man had been a second or two slower at exiting, or if he’d stopped to threaten my wife, I very much doubt he’d be alive. I am sure my first punch would have knocked him out as well as break my hand badly, but I would not have felt it, and the idea I had of there being three men, means I would not have hesitated to stomp him once he was down, to ensure I could be over my baby daughter without distraction from anyone else.
There was no fear, and no anger. It was simply a state of hyper-concern. I would have felt no more emotion ramming a hypothetical home invader’s head into the concrete wall than I would have felt in putting my shoes on to go to work.
I also know from other experiences that in that state my physical movements become essentially perfect. It is a state I have entered a few times in my life, always in extreme circumstances, and which I have found best described in the book of the void, the fifth and last book of the book of five rings, Go Rin No Sho, by Myamoto Mushashi. The translation by Victor Harris being the best one. It is barely one page long.
Well, I don’t wish it upon you, to enter that state of the void, because if and when you do, in my experience, and that of those I know who have experienced it, it is almost a given you will be in a life and death situation. But… if you should experience it, I think you will know that fear is illusion; and that even death is not really… real. Not as such.
And that time too is somewhat of an illusion. And fear only exists if it can hide behind the speed of emotions, for a calm mind will be able to make fear fade, like shadows in sunlight.
I hope some of this information might be useful in some way.
The Speed of Fear and Anger
Something I learned many years ago, in my early 20s in fact, as a result of the intensity with which I pursued martial arts in a very traditional dojo of karate-do in Cape Town, South Africa, is a lesson of psychology and life that I think I have not seen addressed in any detail anywhere.
Succinctly put, it is this:
Something that makes us instantly angry, usually happens so fast that exploding the emotions like a schematic of some engine, is never considered.
What I mean is that if you take the time to consciously go through the steps from start to finish of how you went from neutral or calm to pissed off, very often, you can’t really do it properly.
There is an infinitesimally small space of time where the anger kicks in, but just before that, there is often something else. It is so compressed and so tiny a space of time that it can take real effort to slow the memory of the emotion down enough to be able to take note of it. This is why I make the analogy of a schematic of an engine. It is a bit like consciously taking apart a complicated engine and being very detailed and clear about where and how each part fits with the whole.
In the moment it happens, this process of analysis is practically impossible to do, unless something significant happens to interrupt the instinctive response. For me, a logical sequence that makes the event reasonable can do it, but this rarely happens in life.
Therefore, analysis after-the-fact is pretty much all you have left, and most people are very, very, very unwilling to revisit such events in detail. Especially with a view to self examine instead of blame the outside world in some way.
The intensity of doing martial arts in an environment where real injury is a given if you don’t keep your wits about you, over time, at least for me, and I would say for people who are either obstinate or willing enough to put themselves into harm’s way repeatedly and regularly, is that eventually, you get somewhat desensitised to fear.
From a young age, it was always a natural instinct that anything that made me afraid I wanted to conquer somehow. And it didn’t much matter what kind or type of fear it was.
Eventually, doing enough martial arts, I got to a point that fear of other human beings being able to do me harm was not really much of a concern.
If you take the time to do the self-reflection, you will find some very interesting things about yourself. I found that in my case, anger was usually the result of a sense of injustice. In general this can be true of most people, since anger is often a reaction to a perceived trespassing of some boundary. But I also noticed that at times it was a reaction to fear. The transition from:
normal—>afraid—>angry
was so quick that it took real effort to notice the fear part. In fact, it presented mostly as:
normal—>angry
But it was the nanosecond of fear that was the key.
If a threat presented, the sense of injustice was the result of a fear of being violated somehow.
A potential mugger, violent threat, or even just an uncaring attack in training in the dojo, done with intent to cause damage from someone that did not understand or apply the principles of honourable violence we operated under, would result in a tiny fraction of a second of fear; of being hurt, or someone I cared about being hurt, and then the anger at the injustice of their action towards me or mine.
Eventually, the fear did not present itself anymore once I had been in these type of situations enough times. A kind of slow motion effect allowed me to process the event in real time even as it happened, and then it became quite clear, even obvious at times, the fear of the other person was instrumental in their own actions, quite often. Which in turn allowed a more measured response from me, that is a calmer reaction, which could mean anything from ignoring a perceived “trespassing” even when it might potentially have been quite serious —even to the point of being amused by it— to a calmer and more precise physical response that worked very well and was far more effective because so much more precise.
But the lesson learnt about the internal mechanisms that fear produces was invaluable. And the key take away for me was that fear is always a lie. In some respect or other, fear is always an illusion. I am in fact known for the statement that fear is always an illusion, a lie, for about three decades.
What I mean by this is not that fear is not at times justified, for it can be, but rather that the process of letting fear determine your reaction is counter-productive. In an ideal situation, if you could always react to any situation with a calm mind, the response will invariably be more effective.
The fear response is designed to activate various autonomous responses as quickly as possible, it is a survival mechanism, and therefore an important part of any living creature’s make-up.
If, however, you manage to gradually desensitise yourself to the fear response in various settings, you can learn to produce a correct response that is not any slower than the fear response, but that has the advantage of being a far more balanced one.
Any effective martial art performed at a high level of realism and intensity for years will create some of this. Correct Systema training will be particularly effective at this, and in my experience is far superior to the other martial arts I have investigated for myself in this respect.
But a conscious understanding of this is also very beneficial, and an experiential knowledge of it is extremely beneficial.
For most normal people leading normal lives, the likelihood of them being able to do this is remote, as this level of self-analysis and experience generally comes only from being repeatedly placed in dangerous or even life-threatening situations. Having experienced many of these from early childhood and then choosing them consciously in teenage years and more so as an adult, one can then begin to develop such conscious thoughts, but even then it is rare, because most people who have such life trajectories are on some level survivors of some intense situations and tend to try to avoid such things later in life. Even if they do not, they can become trapped in a process of trying to “harden” themselves for years. A kind of natural response to potential harm if you can’t get away: fight.
In my experience it is a rare fighter that learns the deeper nature of what triggers him and then adjusts and evolves beyond it. Some do it over a few decades of training but even then, it is usually only partial and remains quite rare.
Only the ones that really push themselves to go as deep as possible within themselves do it. Sometimes life circumstances force them to do so, and sometimes their own internal damage drives them to do so, but it is never a comfortable journey, although, in the best of cases, it is certainly a worthwhile one.
If you do manage to essentially wipe out fear, for the most part, you can still be left with what I would call righteous anger, which is just as fast, but doesn’t have the element of fear as the driving factor. It is its own driver; and maybe can’t even be defined as anger really, at least not in its motive efforts and effects.
An example might be a home invasion by violent attackers. It would be normal to have fear for one’s family in such an event. In fact, most people would remain stuck in that aspect of it. My personal response to it, unless it was an active hostage situation before I could even react, is not, however, fear, nor, in the case I experienced, was it anger. I would say it was best described as hyper-concern.
A guy had broken into the apartment I lived in with my then wife and baby daughter of only a few months. My wife had left a kitchen window open and this guy had snuck in and silently hidden in the hallway behind the baby stroller. When my wife woke up, put the baby on the couch in the lounge and went to do something in the kitchenette she had no idea there was a man hiding in the house. This was her routine at about 5am, when the baby woke and although I would wake when she left the room, the lack of sleep in general would make me fall asleep shortly afterwards. When I heard her scream my name, I was in that deep sleep you fall into in the early morning when you’re exhausted.
I remember opening my eyes while still lying in bed, then the next memory is of me pushing the lounge door open. I have no memory of how I got out of bed, opened the bedroom door, went through it and onto the lounge door, nor what I hit with my knee on the way there, as I realised only once the police had arrived much later, that I had a giant swollen bruise on my knee that had dinged the cartilage. I had felt nothing. I did feel it for the next three weeks or so though.
At the moment of pushing the lounge door open, I distinctly recall my thought, which was crystal clear, fully formed and although it had many parts, was absolutely simple due to it’s clarity. For some reason, I expected there to be three intruders on the other side of the door. The lounge of that small apartment was small and regardless of where my baby daughter or wife would be in it, I knew I would get to my daughter even if one of them had already picked her up and had her. The speed at which I was moving would not let anyone focus on harming the baby, worst case she’d fall if I didn’t catch her after dropping whoever was holding her.
I had the entire layout of the lounge in my head and the thing I was sure of was that whoever was on the other side of that door that didn’t belong there would be neutralised without any holding back or reservation whatsoever, and it would happen as fast as possible. I knew I would only require one hit on anyone that was near my daughter. It wouldn’t matter their size or strength. Something I always had inside me in all the fights and physical confrontations I had, including serious ones, was completely gone: I was absolutely free of any restraint in response.
I even had in my head an instant picture of the lounge and which walls, including the tv screen the ones further from my daughter would be rammed into after I took out the one closest to her.
As divine providence would have it, the guy had already jumped over the couch and ran out the side door before I’d entered the lounge. I never saw him and my sense that there was three of them, prevented me from giving chase in case there was someone else still in the house and I’d be leaving my baby and wife with them.
If that man had been a second or two slower at exiting, or if he’d stopped to threaten my wife, I very much doubt he’d be alive. I am sure my first punch would have knocked him out as well as break my hand badly, but I would not have felt it, and the idea I had of there being three men, means I would not have hesitated to stomp him once he was down, to ensure I could be over my baby daughter without distraction from anyone else.
There was no fear, and no anger. It was simply a state of hyper-concern. I would have felt no more emotion ramming a hypothetical home invader’s head into the concrete wall than I would have felt in putting my shoes on to go to work.
I also know from other experiences that in that state my physical movements become essentially perfect. It is a state I have entered a few times in my life, always in extreme circumstances, and which I have found best described in the book of the void, the fifth and last book of the book of five rings, Go Rin No Sho, by Myamoto Mushashi. The translation by Victor Harris being the best one. It is barely one page long.
Well, I don’t wish it upon you, to enter that state of the void, because if and when you do, in my experience, and that of those I know who have experienced it, it is almost a given you will be in a life and death situation. But… if you should experience it, I think you will know that fear is illusion; and that even death is not really… real. Not as such.
And that time too is somewhat of an illusion. And fear only exists if it can hide behind the speed of emotions, for a calm mind will be able to make fear fade, like shadows in sunlight.
I hope some of this information might be useful in some way.
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