Dog Brothers Public Forum

I would say that fighting without any protection is the fast track to not walking as a warrior for all of your days. I think there should be more padding, like armor for the knees.

While I'm not arguing the foot work or the spirit of the thing, I have concerns about some of the kali hand work.

I can't imagine hubad ever being effective against a boxer. A one / two combination is too fast for a flower parry. Even if you use footwork to buy enough time to do the flower parry, your counter will be countered by a single step from the boxer.

So my question is, when your opponent is a great puncher, when do you use hubad?

Peace,
John

That is a great letter. I hope they keep it just the way it is.

I had a thought about the material. I think a part of why it is so hard to show Kali / Silat in a sports context is because people haven't done it for real in a long time.

People who have been in a lot of street fights will go for the groin, the eyes, and so on very quickly.

Let me back up, a problem that our military had in the first world war was that only 10% or so of the troups were actually firing their weapons in the direction of the enemy. Most people really don't want to hurt anyone. It takes a special kind of human being to blow another man away. The military has done a lot of research on how to teach someone to actually kill.

Same thing with fighting. I know I am inclined to only go so far. My whole life, as soon as I have had an advantage I've backed off, letting the other person think better of fighting me. Its always worked out. So despite the large number of hours I have spent learning kali / silat, I would be much more inclined to punch and kick and choke than actually rip out an eye or a piece of genitalia.

I guess my point is that you would see more kali / silat funtioning in the fighting style of people who have a killer instinct brought about by hard times, and that is a difficult thing to train. The sport arts have an easy time because they can train full contact all the time and everyone comes away ok in the end. The people who practice war arts feel they can only take their training so far, and in that way they don't take their training far enough. They aren't used to the full intensity a human can deliver and so they falter when they have the killing moment. Someone with a proper killer instinct would have carried through and killed.

You can gain something like a killer instinct through training, but I'm not sure it is ever as good as the real thing. Can anyone be as good at boxing as a boxer? Can anyone be as good at Silat as someone that has been in a number of knife fights or life and death situations?

There is a meditative aspect of martial arts that has been overlooked for a long time. In Bushido, they say that a man should meditate on death every day, and always keep it in mind. He should imagine himself drowning, burning up in a fire, being shot to death, and having his head cut off. By doing that, the warrior's actions in a fight can happen spontainiously, without thought of victory or defeat.

In addition, a warrior's worth couldn't be known easily in times of peace because there wern't any battles to test him in. They would say they knew the best warrior by watching which warriors conducted themselves with the most care in their daily lives. They had to perform each small task as if it was of great importance. If you can't trust someone to small things, can you trust him with great things?

I guess my basic point is that kali is best for people with a killer instinct. If someone doesn't have it, then they must work very hard to develope one, however you go about doing that. They must push themselves hard to expand their threshold of pain. A person's training in the war arts must be very serious, as if you were really about to fight for your country. Your knuckles and wrist should be strong enough to punch, your grip tight enough to stab, the ball of your toe strong enough to kick, your breath deep enough to last, your understanding of death, wisdom, awareness, instinct, and all the other mental atributes must be conditioned as well.

In the sport arts you can make a goal and follow through with that goal. With war arts, I think it is better to not have a goal, to simply push yourself, and carry on as far as is needed, if that makes any sense.

I recommend Bushido to anyone learning Kali / Silat, because I don't think that most of us go as far as we need to...

That's all why I love the Dog Brother's so much, because they have so much real experiance from the Gatherings and through that, can be without illusions.

Peace,
John

That was a great seminar, always a pleasure to have you in Dayton.

Peace,
John