Blog Article/Post Caveat (Read First Please: Click the Link)
Distance, an important concept in karate, martial arts and their use in self-defense. It would seem from observations of modern karate and martial arts practitioners instinctively assume a certain “distance from an attacker, opponent and/or adversary.” There is a reason why empty-handed disciplines end up gravitating toward the use of the legs then on into the use of weapons.
“In earlier times in our evolution, there was no real way to interact with others at a distance any farther than that allowed by hands, feet, or possibly a stick. That distance of interaction was salient and consequential, and this is what our emotional reaction reflects. In modern times, the situation differs: generals and even soldiers commonly find themselves far removed from the people they kill.”
“We have this emotional component, i.e., the war between the human brain and the lizard (logic vs emotions), of touching someone - that is, interacting with humans at close distances. This hands on close interaction of humans activates the emotional networks. It makes what would be an abstract issue into a personal emotional one. (Emotional and Rational Networks)”
Our emotions have been our survival go to trait ever since we humans first walked upright and gathered into social clan like groups tor survival. Our more logical brain is a recent development in the evolution of humans and therefore sits second to our emotional side. This gives us a good idea to why we call the more emotional side of our brains the symbolic naming of, “The Monkey Brain.” Yes, this is just another way to explain the human (logic) brain, the monkey (emotional) brain and the lizard (limbic instinctual) brain.
Apparently we depend on our emotional side a lot more than we actually know consciously. We must have a combination of logic and emotions to make any decisions made in our daily lives and this becomes critical when conflict and especially violence are used. It comes down to this:
“The emotional systems are evolutionarily old, and therefore shared with many other species, while the development of the rational system is more recent in the evolutionary process. A balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals of emotions and rationalities - is optimal for our brains.“
Achieving this balance is critical to our modern times. It comes to my mind that in order to achieve this goal we MUST know and understand the many myriad facets of our brains regarding emotions and logic to achieve any semblance of control toward making more rational and logical decisions even tho emotions must be present to get the job done. It comes down to just how much influence we allow our emotions, the monkey, when making any decision but so much more critical when making decisions involving conflicts with violence.
“Our emotional reactions are critical to our social interactions, some balance of emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection of human brains. The emotional and rational networks battle over moral decisions, but in another familiar situation as well: how we behave in time.”
Social interactions are the necessity of social survival yet also the bane that results in unnecessary violence with all that comes with the use of violence. Even if natural selection over the millennia has achieved some semblance of balance our modern times seems to have reversed that evolutionary progress into a loss of humanity.
In a nutshell it may best serve self-defense through karate and martial arts to encompass a training model that includes a way to train our minds to reduce to minimum that emotional and rational battle of the brain systems for a more moral decision process.
Distance, we naturally gravitate toward using the legs so that we overcome our natural instinctive resistance to laying on hands to other humans even when we “Other them” to create a psychological distancing. So it now is better understood why karate, an empty handed system, has morphed into a more weapon oriented system often sub-titled karate-n-kobudo. This also goes a long way to help us validate the theory and idea that empty handed practice and training was more of a “prerequisite requirement” to learn, train and use weapons. Weapons take us further away from the emotional natural resistance of laying hands on to other humans to a more distant and acceptable reaching of non-handed, weapons, to defend, compete and win contests. It also allows us the ability in military combat to kill.
I have heard from others who profess to have experience using knives in fighting, maiming and killing where it is thought that to act and use even this instrument that actually puts a mediocre amount of distance in the equation it still takes considerable discipline and mind-control/mind-set/mind-state to actually cut and kill. This gives us the true feeling that laying on of hands can be one of the immense efforts of discipline to cross the line. As we add more distance we add more of the psychological ability to harm others with more than socially driven communications with the use of violence to reach our goals.
See second quote, underline and bold text.
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