Why It is Difficult to Understand Matrixing

I have people asking me, every once in a while, for an example of Matrixing in the Martial Arts. This is something I don’t want to give, and there is an exact reason for me refusing. Let me explain this reason.

The mind is a bunch of memory. That’s all it is. An animal mind has very short span. A goldfish forgets within three seconds. That’s it. Simply, the goldfish is a being that lives within three seconds, and then moves on.

 
Man is a rather longer memoried beast. It would be nice to go into this more, but this is not the time and place. So let it suffice to say that you can remember virtually anything. This lifetime alone, you can recall the most minute memories.

Now, mental abilities are something else, and they have absolutely nothing to do with the mind. Mental abilities, such as the ability to create problems, intuition, telepathy and telekinesis and all that sort of thing, that are not born of memory…they are what the awareness of the individual can do.

Separate them: mind is memory, and mental ability has nothing to do with the mind. Mental ability is what you, the human being, can do in your wildest dreams.

When you do the martial arts you memorize patterns. You memorize techniques. You memorize muscle motion.

You put all this into your mind.

But what can you do?

Well, you can do whatever is in your mind, but that has nothing to do with what you, the human being, can do in your wildest dreams.

You see, all this stuff you memorize into your mind is nothing more than…circuits. Just like an electrical circuit, bound by nodes and boards and such…everything is on a set path.

But you can only trap a human being so long. Eventually, be it a few seconds or a million years, the human being is going to say, ‘wait a minute! I recognize this place! I see what I’ve been doing! I see this memory!’

At that second the circuit is blown, the pattern disappears, and you become free.

Now freedom is relative, and that’s an absolute, and this is another one of those things I should skirt during the course of this essay.

So the point is this, when you blow a circuit you enter into mushin no shin. Mind of no mind. Or…a place where there are no memories telling you what to do.

Here’s a couple of things that go along with that phenomenon.

Mushin no shin can be achieved through the necessity of the moment…because of the need for survival. A fellow on the battlefield may experience it. Time slows down, he develops other perceptions rather instantly.

I remember reading of one fellow who survived Viet Nam because he could ‘smell’ Viet Namese. We could argue whether he actually detected by odor, or whether the human being sensed and attributed this ability to his nose, but the fact remains, he survived through an ability ‘grown’ for the moment.

Mushin no shin might last for a brief instant…then the memories come flooding back in. Still, that experience, that ‘aha’ moment, will open up a human being and let him or her know that there is a lot more to him, and life, than is ever written in a book, any book, in western society…or eastern.

Indeed, it is near impossible to describe this moment except in general and almost cartoonish terms.

The world glows. You understand God. You can see forever. These are descriptions of something that cannot be described.

And there are other phenomena connected with mushin no shin, or as I have segued into…enlightenment.

The difference between mushin no shin and enlightenment may be merely one of degree, or perhaps depth of understanding. Or perhaps the type and size of circuits blown.

But let’s return to the martial arts and why I don’t give examples of matrixing.

The martial arts are a series of memories. They are patterns. They are circuits implanted in the mind through hard work. And here is the bugaboo.

If the martial art is sufficiently illogical, there will be no mushin no shin, except by the severest accident. There will be no enlightenment.

One example of this is boxing. There are no examples that I can think of where a boxer suddenly threw off his gloves and said, ‘I understand that the essential nature of the universe is a golden vibe which we call God.’

There are a few boxers who have been pounded into believing in God, but this is not enlightenment, this is worship by the beaten.

Another example would be kenpo.

To be plain, I love Kenpo, I have loved it since I encountered in 1967, but I was not able to matrix it for a variety of reasons.

It doesn’t create a connection with the earth through serious stance work. It is a put together, a real conglomeration, of everything Ed Parker encountered and thought about: it is the memories, jumbled and reconstructed in a desperate effort to make sense, of one man. It is five evolutions of thought as one man went through life without ever encountering mushin no shin, or an ‘aha’ moment.

Nothing against kenpo, it just best exemplifies illogic in the martial arts.

And what it specifically exemplifies is the basic training method, which is memorization, or implantation of training sequences in the mind.

When I developed matrixing it seemed like an accident, but it was really my search for logic in a universe that is rather slipshod and haphazard and put together by whim and shamble.

Why me, why the martial arts, why the million and one experiences that set me free, I don’t know. Call me a cosmic accident.

But the fact remains, I tripped over a form of logic, described briefly in Boolean algebra, that puts order to ALL the jumbled up strings of random motions that we have been memorizing and calling the martial arts for a zillion years.

Now, if I could, in one word, or simple sentence, describe matrixing, I would, but you wouldn’t understand it.

Here is that sentence:

For something to be true the opposite must also be true.

Doesn’t make much sense, does it?

But it will if you do a few hundred hours of logical work in the martial arts.

Mind you, you could do a few thousand hours of work, a few million hours of work, and get nowhere. You would merely be trying to make sense of the insensible, the stored up memories in your mind.

You see, without the logic, without matrixing…the mindless mass of memorized circuits that are the martial arts just won’t make sense.

And, without the martial arts, with only the logic, you are left with:

For something to be true the opposite must also be true.

A simple phrase that means everything, and nothing, and is sort of like a zen koan, and doesn’t describe any sort of logic you have ever experienced.

So, it is impossible for me to give you an example, your jumbled up memory of a mind just won’t accept it. You will translate it into gibberish.

And, here is a cruel trick, when somebody gets close to understanding they say, ‘Oh, we’ve got that in our system.’

Simply, they have latched on to some simple point, and they do have it in their system, but their mind has slid right off of Matrixing the way teflon slides off bacon and eggs.

So you are caught. You are trapped in your own hard work, trying desperately to justify it, and refusing any example of real logic I could give you.

And your only real solution is to dig into the martial arts, and dig into matrixing that you might hope to understand the martial arts.

And, nobody really understands the martial arts.

True. Sad, but true.

They think they do, and they explain the martial arts by saying something like, ‘a punch is just a punch,’ or, ‘a kick is just a kick.’ Or some other pithy saying after a few decades in the martial arts.

Nope.

That’s just more teflon sliding off the pan.

The real martial arts are a thought.

Not meat, not mind circuits, not even freedom.

They are a simple thought.

And the only way you will ever understand the thought that is the martial arts is through matrixing. I say this because the martial arts have never been understood in the history of mankind. Ever. Not on any planet, not on any plane of existence.

If they had been understood they would have, like one of those circuits, disappeared, and we would have a civilization without war and disease and the general corruption of mankind.

This essay has been written by Al Case, the discoverer of Matrixing. You can read more concerning matrixing and martial arts at Monster Martial Arts. If you are more interested in the type of thought process described in this essay, you should go to the Church of Martial Arts.

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