TABBY CAT Gamespace

www.FightGrub.com

Now a big fad in medicine is Evidence Based Medicine (EBM). The idea being that the boundaries between Western "scientific" medicine vs Eastern medical traditions vs folkloristic medicine don't have to mean much, because all that matters is what works. EBM proponents like to point out that even most of Western medicine is mostly folk practice, in many cases procedures have not been scientifically validated. So the idea is to accept all, but only, those medical practices that have been empirically validated to work as advertised, regardless of source.

A while back I decided the self-defense and hand to hand combat game needs a similar viewpoint. Yeah, sure we have terms like "reality based self defense" and "mixed martial arts" and so on that purport to be beyond style, culture, and economics - just the facts. Only what works.

But I feel they don't have enough data. Sometimes you hear statistics about x% of fights end up on the ground, or y% of fights are initiated with a wild right haymaker and so on. But I don't think a real comprehensive dataset has ever been assembled.

A really good dataset would permit us to issue queries against it, in other words allow for data mining and exploration, just like any large 21st century data collection. It can be stored as a relational database, standard stuff. Then researchers could run queries against it (using SQL but I'll give the queries in quasi natural language for readability), such as:

How many fights in the DB have END_CONFIGURATION = GROUND ?

How many fights in the DB have STARTMOVE = "WILD_RIGHT_HAYMAKER" ?

And we could find out what works best to finish an attacker off:

SORT DESCENDING by TERMINATOR_MOVE

Whatever MOVE code came out on top of the above query was most frequent, and we should train that, be it eye gouge or whatever. We could learn all kinds of things like how often women were able to disable male attackers, what and how improvised weapons are used, whatever attribute of a fight can be given a standard code could be the basis for searching, sorting, querying, collating and counting statistics.

Of course, there remains the problem of assembling the raw fight data itself. Maybe police departments have some records that could be fed in, but I figure nowadays, with all the vids up on youtube and everywhere, we should be able to assemble such a db with just some routine data entry work, off the internet videotapes of street and schoolyard battles. Maybe we have to do some initial pre-filtering, on the basis of guidelines. For example, maybe any fight that appears to have been either genuinely or falsely staged for no other purpose than getting into the DB itself should be excluded. There would be some tricky calls, but no matter, every DB construction effort has issues with raw data sources. We shall overcome!

I'll show you what just one DB record might look like:

URL = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-79K6wpbwY&NR=1

SITE = youtube

TITLE = "road rage knockout punch"

TYPE = 1-1

CONFIGURATION = vehicle

INITIAL_STATE = verbal faceoff

DECISIVE_MOVE = defender right to aggressor face

OUTCOME = knockdown(aggressor)

TAG = "road rage"

Get the idea? Of course there'd be lots more standard tags eventually, to facilitate statistical analysis by experts, and individuals could do their own custom searches as well. Then and only then can we construct evidentially validated martial arts training.

So, in anticipation of that day, I plunked out $9.99 for the multi-year lease on domain registration: www.fightgrub.com.

I figure that's what the website that eventually provides access to the whole dataset will have to be called.

That's "grub" as in Merriam Webster definition:

intransitive verb1 a: to dig in the ground especially for something that is difficult to find or extract b: to search about <grubbed in the countryside for food — Lamp>

What's that you say? Why don't I do it myself? Are you out of your fricking mind? Listen I'm only going to say this once more: I'm a cat. A feline! We don't dirty our paws with this kind of human ugliness. It's only the humans who love databases, love to feel they have reality roped and tied, cornered and corralled, the whole universe Guantanamo'ed in a bright orange jumpsuit. But we cats don't think like that. We are right-brain animals to the core. So I am decisively above the fray. Besides this idea is ahead of its time. I need to wait for the ponderous pendulum of human thought to catch up. But when it finally does, I'll be there, paw outstretched, just waiting to sell my ownership of the domain and hit the beach with the proceeds.

Gotcha

I can't believe it, I got a major download from the universe at last night's senior student class. Who'd of thought it,  you cannot predict or program this kind of major upgrade. You can only stand right in the middle of the lane waving your hands and hope it targets you.

Bit of trouble to get in position though. Think of the Nagasaki bomb - they slagged through hundreds of tons of earth and ore to sift out a few pounds of uranium, and then purified that down to just a few grams of plutonium. In the same way, I have to travel hours over hill and dale to get to an occasional class with my teacher, which yields a 24 karat insight in about 30 seconds of actual elapsed time. Anyway in this case it really paid off.

Bulk and muscle-wise, I'm not exactly Arnold Schwarznegger. Although maybe at one time I would have been classed around average size for USA adult male, I have been noticing as the decades roll by that I'm shrinking. It isn't due to old age, it's because the average size of an adult USA male is expanding. Lately I feel like a midget in my own country. I go to buy clothes, you never see sizes plain old S or M or even L any more. Sizes begin with XL, and range through XXL, XXXL, 2XSL, Double XXSL, and on up. Even the females are getting bigger than me now. All these huge people around me. Nowadays the average USA male is tall, broad, voluminous, just massive. But though I'm (now) on the smaller side, I'm reasonably on the strong side. (Just to get through the entire Ashta Primary Series you gotta be somewhat strong, to do a good, clean, no-touch jumpback in between every side of each asana.)

But what I can't stand is to use strength in any form of combative practice. Whether it's a free grappling roll around thing, or boxing, or Tai chi push hands, or whatever, if you use strength sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't. But one things for absolute sure - use of strength in a tussle is a complete, unmitigated bore. Not to mention, if you are unnecessarily tense you'll gas out before the end of a 3-minute round, no exceptions to that.

The alternative to strength in today's combatively correct vocabulary is structure. It's always structure this, correct structure that... blabitty blah blah. Or on the other side of the same coin (overly physical interpretation), internal stylists nowadays love the word structure as a fig leaf because they are too embarrassed to talk about ki anymore. Anyway, I don't buy it. I have little interest in structure. That's too dependent on the physical body and physical Earth-plane principles. Screw that. I'm trying to transcend this physical snakepit, not wallow in it. My idea is, it shouldn't matter much what structural shape a live high-voltage wire happens to be in when you touch it: bent, twisted, coiled, straightened, whatever - you touch it, you're fried, that's my ideal. Besides, what if I incarnate next go-round as a Dilithium Worm on Zeta Reticulii? What happens to all my precious bit of structure then, eh? Mmmm?

But what does that leave on the table? It leaves only energy. Shiva-Shakti, that's where it's at. E equals m c fucking squared. But the problem comes in that this physical pigpit here below (Earth plane Time-Space Illusion) doesn't wanna cooperate, for the most part. It really isn't so trivial to combatively substitute pure energetics, in place of all the crapola already dissed and dismissed up above (size, strength, structure, and other such tedious physical-plane hogwash).

So my goal has been, from Day One back when I jumped onto the gameboard of training, back when Pterodactyls ruled the Jurassic skies - how to deploy energy so it gets an immediate and effective, no-backtalk, physicalized result. That's why I glommed onto ZMQ taiji, because he was showing that.

And yesterday, in my teacher's class, I got the key. Not the key to cultivating the energy, already covered that earlier under The Missing Basic. But really much more vexing to me has been, it's easy to feel it but how do you combat-deploy the stuff! And last night that was just "shown" to me, like - downloaded from the universal mind, while working with somebody in the class.

I'll write it up at some point.

Spi

Finished  today with intensive training for Remote Viewing. I'm thinking maybe tomorrow I might put up some details of some of the test viewings here, maybe a session transcript and the target.

By the way, if any reader here doesn't think psi power (ability to see/hear/know beyond space/time physical constraints) is "real" then you might as well just check out of here right now, go read another blog. It's real as hell. Whether or not it can be developed to the point that it could buy you a reliable, significant advantage in your perpetual struggle against all your fellow humans in the daily battle for survival, satisfaction, and significance here in the rough and tumble of this predatory vale of tears is a matter for further debate and investigation, a practical question for a practical world. But the basic power is absolutely real.

In a way it's a lot like a mental martial art. Like playing mental tai chi with your own (or the universal) unconscious - which seems to know everything. It knows everything, but it offers knowledge very softly. You have to be able to detect its subtle 4-ounce "push" or you'll totally overlook the accurate target images flooding into you. At the same time, you can't be too mentally aggressive or grabby either. More than four ounces of effort applied pro-actively scares it way, overlays your own brain's stupid personal ego and irrelevant stories. It is the ultimate in soft martial training.

Well. Maybe I'll write some serious details on this later.

Seattle July 12 Zheng style seminar

Below is the syllabus for my July 12th 1-day Zheng style taijiquan intro seminar. All based on Ben Lo's five key training principles. They look so easy don't they? Whole thing looks simple enough on the surface doesn't it? People think they already know these. But knowing is doing. And the mind-blowing aspect of this style is hidden in the logical rigor and perfectly machined precision of this practice. We'll train as hard as the people can take. Of course there'll be a lot more background and anecdotage than this skeletal syllabus can show, see flyer link above for more on those topics.

Zheng Manqing style Taijiquan

Introduction: Background and Goals

Five Training Principles – Explanation
    Relax
    Body upright
    Beautiful Lady’s Hand
    Turn Waist
    Separate Weight

Form I: Foundation Elements
    Infinite Posture (first 2 Principles)
    Preparation Posture (first 3 Principles)
    Forward Energy Posture 70/30
    Supplementary Principles
    Stationary Zheng Micro-Form

Form II: Atomic Nucleus
    Opening (5-Changes arm training)
    Grab Sparrow Tail:
        Ward Off left
        Ward Off right
        Rollback
        Press
        Push

Push Hands
    Introduction: Background and Goals
    Drills:
        Fixed step: single hand: patterned
        Fixed step: double hand: patterned
        Fixed step: double hand: free: defense
        Fixed step: double hand: free: offense
        Fixed step: double hand: free

Soul on Ice

For training purpose, there seem to be two distinct kinds of tension. Let's call them deep tension and surface tension.

Deep Tension

Deep tension is long-term, almost built-in rigidity that most people have from long-term exposure to the horrific shitstorm of life down here on the physical plane, the Time-Space Illusion (TSI). That can include all kinds of buried emotional trauma, physical injury, fears, complexes, long-term chronic bad ergonomics, lifestyle issue, the list is endless. You know, deep stuff. Those things are sometimes visible as obvious postural or motion distortion, and/or less apparent but lurking villainously beneath an otherwise placid exterior like a anatomical landmine or white shark set to take you down in later life with all kinds of disease reactions. At least, that's the New-Agey/pseudo-medical porn/propaganda.

So you gotta have somebody or some method to work on it for you, right? You need some expert who can strip your body with his eyes down to its bare pitiful emotional bonework, evaluating every tendon for alignment and tone, tsk-ing over every deep muscle knot, applying his carpenter's level to the stack of your vertebrae. This is the world of posture and anatomical fetishism exemplified by Rolfing, Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, some sub-schools of Pilates, Iyengar yoga, and on and on it goes. These guys may do a lot of good for people, don't get me wrong. But when I see how they work, I can't help but think of the typical auto mechanic:

"Yeah, got your estimate almost ready. My guys are still checking the transmission, but right up front I can tell you your brake pads are totally shot and the couplers are hanging by a thread and the magnetic depressurizer was leaking lube all over the piston ratchet, which we found jammed up into the cranning chamber. Mister you're lucky you even got this car in here safely this morning. We're talking minimum $1200 but I personally wouldn't take it back on the highway until you get the front left fristerator at least defractionated, better replaced, that'll put us up to $1900 but I'll need to get back to you on the transmission."

That's how it is with Deep Tension body workers too. There's always something wrong with your posture and your anatomy and by implication your psyche probably isn't very pretty either, since we know it's all connected right? And the real beauty of the system is that you could ransom your car at end of the day from the mechanic above, drive it out with a lighter wallet but a happy feeling of auto-optimization, then take that same car into the shop across the fricking street the very next morning and you know what?

"Look I don't know if you want to spring for all the work right away but real soon you're looking at a carburetor replacement, if the engine block will hold up long enough to even make that worthwhile..."

I don't mean to question anybody's sincerity here. I drive a car, I need these guys too, and let's face it most of our bodies and minds are just a total junkpile. But this stuff takes decades to work out. There's no pull-date on the quest for total physical perfection, and meanwhile you could miss something that's even more interesting, in its own way, which is:

Surface Tension

Surface tension is just inappropriate effort for a particular task at end. Easy stuff. Think of when you go to pick up what you believe is a box full of heavy books but unexpectedly it was completely empty. You used too much strength that's all. An obvious feeling, a clear realization, no biggie. And that applies in more subtle ways through a lot of our physical and mental activity. Just wasting energy that's all.

Then when you add in the awareness of ki (semi-electrical intrinsic energy), things get even more interesting. Here's a news flash: ki can flow very powerfully through a non-optimized body!

Working with surface tension doesn't particularly need to deeply implicate your relationship with your mom or feeling unloved or fearing the world or whatever. Yeah yeah I know all about character armor and long term rigidity and postural this and that, sure it's all connected. But we know it isn't exactly the same thing, because had somebody told you, in just the second before you attempted that lift, that the box is actually empty, your experience would have been totally different - with your same present lousy body, mind, emotional baggage, your whole catalog of ever-so-fascinating deep stress disorders all that crap still in there, just your intuitive and immediate adjustment of surface tension would have done the right thing then and there for you, on the spot. (If the guy who told you it was empty turned out to be wrong or gaming you, then you'd get the same lesson in the opposite direction.) So yes, the two issues are connected, overlapping sure - but not totally identical.

Ideally I guess you should go through one of the Deep Work methods above and get your soul straightened once and for all. But meanwhile you can learn a  lot and enjoy a lot just  playing with  surface tension awareness. There are lots of people  who  are great taijiquan players in terms of total water-like qualities  (water = Tao, remember?) but whose posture and anatomy and every damn little ligamental alignment are very far from ideal. Physically that is. But they have a deep understanding of surface tension and sensitivity to it in themselves and others. Conversely there are numbers of people who are great yogi's and dancers and massage therapists and so on who have ironed every kink from every joint and coupling and really gone to town on their body and psyche to smooth it all to perfection - but when a great master like Ben Lo touches them, in his Taijji mode, he detects their surface tension immediately and throws them around the room at will.

Ben Lo type of Zheng style taijiquan (and probably lots of other surface tension oriented methods) has some (few) absolute postural principles, yet they are extremely simple and straightforward and apply perfectly smoothly to anybody. In fact we all use them all through daily life all the time, but we just don't normally extract all the benefit of combining and concentrating their effect - becoming conscious of surface tension. That's all the Zheng type of training is doing for us. Simple right? Tao should be simple.

Point being you can have some fun and make some progress in playing with surface tension through some kinds of Taiji training, even while you continue your longer term slog through the lowest foothills in your humble approach to the awesome ultimate mountain of total body/mind postural/anatomical Perfection.

Shiva Om

We never do anything for the last time without sadness of heart.

- Thomas De Quincey

Well that's it for my original Ashtanga shala - 6 feet under, RIP, or in the crude but evocative Chinese phrasing: 四脚朝天 (four feet point up to the sky). Kaput!

I had never gone near yoga before when suddenly in late summer 06 I decided to fling myself headlong into the most kickass form of yoga I could find from a superficial but passionate net search - Ashtanga. Like all kinds of training I have tried, this started as just another (somewhat belated) "checklist item". I have to try everything possible to transcend this predatory matrix world, to try to identify any possible source of personal power beyond the reach of the Hive - no matter how farfetched.

So I dove into the Ashtanga practice with a will, giving it my all, for a solid 12 month I attended every single morning "Mysore" (self-paced) practice session offered at either my home shala stateside (about 7  motnths of my Yoga Year) or my home-away-from-home shala in Tokyo (the other 5 months of my Ashtanga Annum)- both shala's staffed by direct students of the founder Pattabhi Jois. Every single damn morning for a year! Except "moon days" when the moon reaches a change of state (full or gone) and Sundays. Otherwise I was on my mat from 6 to almost 8 every morning either stateside or Tokyo shala. That's how addicted I got  for that year. And I learned the whole Primary Series. I could actually do some of those asana's I learned too!

But the home shala was special in that the teacher was into Hindu chanting which he performed at the kirtan sessions they sometimes held. Those really blew me away. I never knew about this Hindu chant stuff before, had never even heard it. I guess I have been too Sino-centric all these years or something, how could something that cool have escaped me? But I made up for lost time by scraping the 20 best of those from about 30 music CD's, my feedstock pile, onto my player.  Nothing removes your brain better than surround-sounding yourself with a really rocking technofied Nataraj type of chant.

And I met some fantastic people in the yoga world! Bodies of steel licorice, hearts of solid gold. But they don't like their names mentioned on blogs...

And it even triggered me to immortalize the whole experience in an epic yoga poem comparable to say, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Tabby and the Three Travelers

(scroll down and read from the bottom post upwards for parts 1, 2, and 3 of Tabby and the Three Travelers magnum opus)

Yet despite all this overwhelming coolness, by late summer last year, after about 12 months of it, I knew it wasn't really me. Or I wasn't going to be it. Not a match. I loved it in a way, yet it's too much overhead, too much trouble on a tangent to my main interests, which are ultimately and forever zeroed onto combat and power. How to transcend the matrix. How to wriggle out from the talons of the Hive-Mind High Command that controls every single aspect of life on this predatory planet system. Yoga was fun but fun isn't good enough. I realized that my every-morning-for-35-years mini Northern Shaolin 10 minute stretch routine, done with no mat or chants or blocks or props or any damn thing, gave me about as much overall body flexibility as the far more involved full Primary Series. Yeah I know the Series is meant to harvest you a lot more than just basic flexibility. Sad I just don't have time for it. Bigger fish to fry.

And now, another year, the shala just closed its doors forever.

But I retain a soft spot for the insular, somewhat fanatic Ashtanga cult...ure! Hee hee... But seriously, every school for any concentrated hardcore discipline, no matter how small or local, has a kind of grandeur and greatness, is a kind of mini-civilization. When that fails or crumbles once and for all, as now my stateside former shala has done, it's always sad. It gives you the same twinge in the heart you get from the famous lines:

Look for it only in books,

for it is no more than a dream remembered.

        A Civilization gone with the wind...

~ In Pace Requiescet AYS! ~

Handout

For the Zheng style seminar on July 12, I will give a handout that summarizes the key theory and training points, such as:

• Lineage
• Core internal connection architecture targeted by Zheng training
• 5 main practical training principles
• Bunch of auxiliary practical training principles
• Q&A about Zheng style and taijiquan

... and so on.

After the seminar I will upload that handout to the blog here.

Quote of the Day:

"Zheng style Taijiquan training is rigorous, precise, demanding, exacting - and even boring, at first. It's one of those an-inch-of-meditation-an-inch-of-Buddha things"
- T. Cat

Curve ball

For my money, the hook to the head is the nastiest move in boxing. I'm talking real world stuff here, not traditional martial arts, ok? I'm talking about a hook delivered by a skilled and experienced opponent who seriously intends to take you out. The few times I have been knocked out (not just down, I mean out) have all been from hooks. They are baaaaad because:

- Hard to see coming
- Extremely powerful
- Target area (side of skull) is very vulnerable to shock impact
- Limited response options, slipping doesn't apply well, parry difficult, basically block or duck
- Even if blocked they can transfer a huge amount of force right through your guard straight into your head

Wicked, wicked, evil move. Notice how in soccer nobody "heads" the ball with the flat side of the head. There's a reason for that. Even though the Bible says:

And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang it, and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth.

- 1Sam.17:49

But I bet he really got Goliath in the temple, on the side of his head.

Sic transit

What I like best of all in the vast Yiquan bestiary of postures, drills, and training moves is the long pole work. Of course I did a wildly gymnastic long pole set back in the day, my primordial Northern Shaolin formative phase. The teachers called that White Eyebrow (白眉) long pole set, it was super fun. I used to do that at the public demo's sometimes. It really loosens you up, gives a feeling of freedom and range like nothing else. But it has its downsides too: the need to have a long Chinese-style tapered pole; great athletic skills and super flexibility; lots of headroom and sideroom (watch the chandelier!)... too much overhead overall for practical daily practice. Thus have I long since left that behind in the dust of my rear-view mirror. I can still do the swing patterns though.

Anyway, enter Yiquan's pole work. It's a wonderful ki extension method when done in shili mode. Though it uses the same kind of tapered Chinese waxwood long pole, you can do it either walking in a line or just standing in place. There is also a fali version of it, which is like the "pole shaking" methods that you sometimes see touted by various internal (yeah right!) keyboard warriors these days. Somehow Yiquan's approach to this just feels better to me than the "pole shaking" stuff I have seen/tried from other teachers, though I admit there is a strong family resemblance. Anyway it feels really good. They have the usual obsessively detailed Yiquan atomic-level mico-analytics of movement: up/down (上下) ; right/left (左右) ; forward/back (前后) - all of which can be done either in situ, ding bu (定步) or in walking zou bu (走步) mode. The same inventory whether in shili (试力) or fali (发力) style.

So that's 3 directionals X 2 dynamics X 2 energetic styles... 12 variations just in this one obscure corner. Typical Yiquan combinatorics!  And there is more pole work I'm not discussing here.

(Please don't anybody write to me asking to learn this work from me, the only way is to immerse yourself in the entire Yiquan system since the pole work is one small part of a totally unified set of training principles. See Yao Chengguang or Yao Chengrong for details.)

* * *

Can you believe what dumbasses we are?? I got into Peak Oil thing in 1998, clued by my friend Jay Hanson. At that time when gold was about 250 USD/oz and oil about 20 USD/bb, all you got for mentioning that to any educated, sensible, rational person was rolled eyes and you could see the little internal flag triggering in their heads: bozo... nutcase... asshole. Anybody who talked like that triggered some kind of silent syllogism in sophisticated people:  realist => survivalist => terrorist. Even though I am well known on the net for my strict advocacy of ahimsa principle!  But can you expect jackbooted mil.gov thugs to know the meaning of that word?

But my point was simple and we still had 10 years left to do it, even then (though we should have followed up when a brief window opened on this in the 1970s).

Points for National Survival:

1. Mass Transit: you know, trains like Japan. For Christ's sake is it really that hard to understand?
2. Local food/organics: Victory gardens, Community Supported Agriculture, like Cuba since Soviet collapse.
3. Off electrical grid: Every household at least try to get off grid.
4. Water catchment: Every household install and use catchment water as much as possible given local conditions.
5. Medical: Everybody train in first aid and basic low-tech/barefoot health care

That's it, just those 5 things are all we would have had to gradually emphasize and ramp up, over TEN FRICKING YEARS, even at that late date (1998), something could have been done. Instead all these Neoconservative assholes just went out and bought hummers and bankrupted the country with Nazi style invasions 10000 miles away while the whole "Homeland" (nice Nazi word there too) went down the shithole. .

Now the system is starting to definitively crack and it may just be too late.

Fat chance

"When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured."
- Anton Chekhov 

My interest in martial arts / combatives training has always been driven by one question: Is there a training method that can transcend or overcome native disparities?

What does it mean? A large, strong, athletically gifted young or young-middle-aged male will, ceteris paribus, beat the crap out of a small, young or aged, frail, slow, weak or disabled female. Everybody just seems to accept that disparity.

Of course as written above it is hopelessly jumbled, to the point of incoherence. Because there are so many attributes that are only semi-correlated with one another, it is pointless to try to bundle them into explanatory categories. Can a 90 year old woman defeat a large man who is sleeping in a total drunken stupor? Could a guy in a wheel chair take down an injured NFL linebacker from behind, with a sneak attack? And what do all these people have against one another in the first place? It is a meaningless discussion. But then, everything is meaningless.

So I'll continue for a moment. The key point to me is, can trained attributes overcome inherent or situational advantages? Yes I know the terminology, semantics, and logic of this are twisted beyond repair. But I suspect you get my idea here. As I've often said, I am searching for a training method that would allow an otherwise healthy 70 year old woman, with 5 years of concentrated training in the given method but no other combative skills or experience (so then, at her age 75) to be able to decisively slamdown or destroy a NFL pro linebacker in his prime who attacks her by surprise, with lethal intent (but who himself has not been trained in the given candidate combative method). Further, if that NFL attacker himself were to receive training in the given candidate method, he could still be either defeated or at least neutralized by the elderly woman if she had a bit more of that training than him.

It is hopelessly muddled. I know it. Yet senseless though it obviously is, that's my interest. It leaves out all kinds of considerations such as why is the guy attacking her in the first place? Can either or both of them be armed, and what is the definition of armed anyway? And maybe some third party guy would call an airstrike into their fight zone and have them both nuked out - then what is the epistemological status of that guy?

And how does basic killer instinct fit into all this?

Anyway, my utterly pointless and meaningless quest continues. And this has repercussions far beyond earth plane physical self-defense. Because we all know very well that here on earth Might Makes Right. We are all under the boot of whoever has the most guns. That's natural. But once we jump off this mortal coil into the Astral spheres, I would like to know whether it is going to be the same violently repressive scene or not. As above so below? Or not? If we can train some qualities to get ourselves out from beneath the wheel, even if they don't apply on Earth plane, they may be useful to us later on.

Be that as it may, for a long time, off and on, I have trained basic, scroungy "club" type of sparring-partner Western boxing. Boxing has its faults (ouch!) but despite all its sportive restrictions and assumptions it's probably more "real" (use your own intuitive definition) than 99% of the other "martial arts" training out there. But now I want to ramp it up to a higher level. So in a few weeks I'll go train with a trainer/teacher who has recovered and restored the older forms of boxing to create a hybrid of sport boxing base + older illegal moves. Hansoku (反則) stuff, as they say in Japan (but this training isn't in Japan)

So. Watch this space, I will report on this eventually, a Special Report included Free Of Charge as part of your Tabby Cat (c) "Prestige Power Player Premium Platinum Premier Program" subscription.