Bunch of readers have written to me about "The Missing Basic". Some to deride, others to ask for details. Some have even accused me of being mentally ill for talking about such a thing. But talking about the Missing Basic is actually the height of rationality.
First, what do I mean by it? I borrowed the phrase from Robert Monroe's work on out-of-body experience, and whose training programs I have attended a number of times (come to think of it, I should blog about that sometime). In my usage, for training, it means suppose a person has a limited time (that would be all of us), doesn't matter if that 1 hour a day or 5 minutes or 20 hours a day, it has a LIMIT. Then given training goal A, what is the optimal method X to spend that time T doing, such that you maxmize your progress towards A?
In my case, goal A is total superhuman internal combat mastery a la Yang Lu Chan or Ueshiba. Obvious and common goal, we all secretly want to be superheroes. My time varies, just call it T hours per day. My assumption is that strengthening and increasing my internal power (jing, qi, ki, hunyuanli, whatever) is the way to get to Goal A. All the great masters have said so, I take that as a given.
Ok then, what is the optimal way to spend my time T in order to maxime A? Far from mental illness, this is pure rationality. In fact, this is ENGINEERING METHODOLOGY! In good engineering practice, correct professional practice, nothing is done randomly, or because your friend suggested it over lunch, or you saw TV commercial, or your Dad always did it this way. Nope, every single design decision, every single resource allocation is driven by purely objective and rigorous cost/benefit analysis. That means an attempt to optimize the cost/benefit ratio at all times.
Well same here. What is the optimal way to spend T given goal A? Should it just be a random collection of junk known as a "style" that somebody taught you for their own cultural or financial marketing purposes? I think not. It needs to be justified. In engineering practice, you cannot jointly optimize two independent variables. This unfortunately is what most "styles" are attempting to do: give you some "fitness" and "health"; a dash of supposed "self-defense"; a lot of cultural baggage; large dose of financial flimflammery - et voila, behold, a "Style" is born.
Fuck that. I want results, by my own metric at least. So the idea of The Missing Basic is actually eminently rational. True, in some endeavors it doesn't make sense to talk about the 'one best way'. In some cases, it will be just too much dependent on varying circumstances, starting point, personal limitations and preferences, etc.
But in other things, it does make sense to talk about 'best practice'. In dentistry for example, though of course there is constant experimentation and research, at any given time there is a broad, somewhat rough but basically focused consensus on the one best way to repair a cavity or do a crown. There may be some controversy but typically around only small peripheral points with just a couple of real contenders for the 'one best practice' prize.
So: What (narrowly defined) practice or drill gives the best internal martial arts results in a limited practice time? Is it seated meditation? Hitting a heavy bag? A tai chi form? A qi gong set? Yoga stretching or breathing? Sparrring or push hands the entire hour? Or some (rationally justified) combination of the above (and if so, in exactly what proportion and why) ?
That's the challenge of The Missing Basic.
And I have found, purely by accident, after studying MUCHO training methods in very considerable depth, that Yiquan happens to contain, as one item in its huge syllabus, The Missing Basic. Simple as that.
So now that we've dealt with the philosohical baggage and bludgeoned the idiots who called me mentally ill for bringing this up in the first place, what about it? Why don't I spill the beans and just say what that drill is? Few reasons:
1. What have you ever done for me, except carp about my blog sucks?
2. If I did write it, you wouldn't take it seriously anyway. You'd try it once for a moment and say "eehhh ... don't do that much fer me ..." and crack open another beer.
3. Most importantly, more seriously now, is that unfortunately this TMB does not quite exist in a total vacuum. It is a single practice, but it has to be done correctly. That means you need to be taught the practice by a fully qualified Yiquan teacher. Which means you really need to learn the full Yiquan program, as I have. Only then can you correctly zero in on TMB. And even if you think you know Yiquan, you probably don't. A lot of what passes for Yiquan at least in USA is just lingkongjing crap and mindless content-free zhan zhuang, has no real connection to what the Yao brothers teach, so it is a false foundation.
Analogy again: Suppose I said that Ashtanga yoga contains the Missing Basic, and that it is (randomly choosing something now) the asana Urdhva Padmasana, depicted below:
Now this is actually not one of the harder asana's. In my Ashtanga time I had no trouble with this one. But imagine you never studied yoga before, and now you hear this is THE pose to gain enlightenment or whatever. Even if you could do it physically (some people cannot) you'd be missing the heap of nuances and subtle adjustments and bandhas and breathing and other background teachings that go into doing even this relatively straightforward pose correctly. So even if this pose were the (yogic) Missing Basic, just hearing about it this way wouldn't do you much real good.
Final point is that I need to validate my TMB practice by getting out and doing some serious push hands and sparring with some real good people More on that in some future post.
