000 HowIDevelopMatrix

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

AL CASE (Master Founder)

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING introduction

The word ‘Matrix’ comes from Roman times. It is a cage used to hold a female wolf for breeding purposes. Matrixing is also a method of graphing. I want you to consider that the martial arts on this planet are a mess. Do you fight like one of the five animals? Do you fight with a method developed out of religion or other philosophy? Do you fight like your cinematic hero? Do you fight like some fellow who advertises that he is unbeatable? There is a lot of information out there, and it is hard to decide which method is right. Matrixing will end that dilemma. Matrixing will enable you to understand all  the arts. Matrixing is a scientific ‘graphing’ of methods of combat. And, on a more personal note, realize that you can only be beaten by that which you don’t understand. If you understand everything, however, then you can’t be beaten.

CHINESE KENPO

(Kenpo-Fist Law) I began studying Chinese Kenpo in 1967. This was a time when the martial arts were not well known. A few examples of Judo had been seen on the big screen, and people talked about karate chops, but Bruce Lee was still around the corner. One day a friend asked me if I wanted to go check out a karate school that had just opened up. ‘No,’ I said. He

said,

‘Why

don’t

you

come

along

and

we’ll

get

a

hamburger

afterwards?’ Hmmm. Hamburger. ‘Okay.’ Such were the illustrious beginnings of my martial arts career. Once at the studio, I signed up for five karate lessons. I didn’t sign up because of any interest, but because of a smooth talking salesman and a well scripted pitch. I thought the first lesson was funny. I followed directions and grinned a lot and thought the whole thing was kind of silly. The second lesson was still funny, but it was like something was eating at me. I didn’t grin so much. there was something about this stuff.... The third lesson I was standing, watching my instructor show me a move, and suddenly the entire room glowed with a golden light. The ceiling was glowing, the walls were glowing, everything was glowing. In awe, I realized that my instructor had no idea what was happening to me. 2

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

I realized that I would do the martial arts the rest of my life. It would be some time before I realized that I had had a mystical experience such as the one experienced by Morehei Uyeshiba, the founder of Aikido (Way of Harmony in the Spirit). I worked hard at Kenpo, but was always struggling with boredom. I would learn a new technique, practice it a few times, then wonder what was next. I

was

hungry,

and

didn’t

realize

that

the

modern

approach

of

‘entertaining’ students wasn’t for me. After a year I became an instructor. My notes concerning the techniques even became a training manual for the school. One night I was trying to get into a locked car. I delivered a powerful sidekick. The glass window remained unbroken. I blinked. Then one of my fellow instructors had a humbling experience. He got in a fight, and no matter how hard he hit his opponent, he couldn’t put him down. Vaguely, I started to realize that even though I had a vast knowledge of hundreds of techniques, something was wrong. One day, while I was at work, I took note of a new worker. The worker, a nerdy guy named Alex, thought nobody was watching him, and he gave a funny little hop and kick and the whole wall shook. ‘Hey!’ I came forward. ‘How’d you do that?’ It turned out that Alex had been practicing the martial arts for about three months. He had been practicing something called ‘Kang Duk Won.’ Three months, and he had more power than I had after two years. Alex introduced me to his brother, Thiel, who happened to be a high ranking Hell’s Angel. Thiel and I had an interesting talk. Basically, he grabbed me by the shirt front and said ‘Work your first technique on me.’ I locked his hands and slammed upward with a forearm. I brought my forearm around and raked down on his wrists. Before I could deliver a chop to his throat, he laughed and threw me through a wall. Yep. All the way through a wall. He picked me up and said, ‘Okay, grab me.’  Dutifully, I grabbed his shirt front and knotted my hands with all my strength. Without any flowery technique, he punched me on the chest and through that wall again. That about did it for Chinese Kenpo. Before I leave off, I want to make one point. I was an instructor in Kenpo. I was respected. Yet I tossed away my investment of sweat and blood and moved on. I took off my Kenpo belt and put on a white belt. It took a lot for me to do that, yet I was willing to learn.

KANG DUK WON KOREAN KARATE

(Kang Duk Won-House for Espousing Virtue) 3

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

The Kang Duk Won in San Jose was a hole in the wall. It was run down, shabby, and not too impressive. The windows, however, looked like they were bulging. They were just bent outward like bubbles. They were glowing. I entered the small school, introduced myself, and was told I could watch a class. After a short spat of warm ups, the class began charging down the mat. One, two, three, step and punch. They turned, punched towards me, and I found out why the windows were bulging. Raw, warm, wonderful power rushed past me. It was breathtaking. It was like being in one of those commercials were the fellow is sitting in a chair in front of a huge speaker and his hair is being blown straight back. The instructor’s name was Bob. He was short and skinny and had a narrow face. He could put one finger through a piece of plywood and leave a hole. Once, when I was up at his house, he let me kick his personal kicking bag. I bounced off it and almost fell down. He used to pack his bags with circles of newspaper. He would pack them until they had the resiliency of cement. But I am getting ahead of myself. When I started training I found that item that had been missing from Kenpo. Raw, knuckle busting, endless repetition. The same technique thousands of times. It was okay to practice your techniques in the air, but you’d better spend a good amount of time thrusting your fingers into one of the sandboxes at the front of the room; you’d better work your legs out daily on one of the kicking bags. Every technique had to be done as it was real, and if you were the one being practice on you’d better just gut up and learn to take it. I always had bruised shins and forearms. A normal one hour class was like an eight hour day, and when I walked out I was usually too tired, or battered, to put the pedals down on my car. Eventually, I toughened up. I stayed at the Kang Duk Won for seven years, and I had many experiences. My instructor, interestingly enough, never talked. Seven years and he said maybe a half dozen things to me. He said, ‘A tight fist is a heavy fist.’ And he said, ‘There are many ways to the top of the mountain.’ The students at the Kang Duk won were a varied bunch. There were usually a few choppers parked at the curb, and a spattering of Hell’s Angels or other outlaw biker’s would be inside studying. There were a couple of grave diggers. There was a glass blower. 4

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

There was the aeronautics engineer from Ames Research Center (next to Moffet Field). There were students from San Jose State. And so on. Each of those unique individuals became something more to me. I traded pain with them. We bruised forearms and mingled our sweat on the mat. We suffered through temperatures that could soar over a 120 in the summer, and drop to freezing in the winter. When I meet one of them today the years are gone and we are instantly friends. In short, we went to war together. After a couple of years I was getting close to my Black Belt. At that point strange things began to happen. One day I was on lunch break at the factory where I worked. I was sitting on a curb and staring at a rock. I decided to stare at the rock until I understood the secret of the universe. After a while I grew bored. Then I realized...the rock wasn’t boring me, I was boring me. I was a boring fellow. I had discovered the secret of the universe. I began experiencing a ‘sixth sense’ in my life. I could tell when things were going to happen before they happened. I stopped dreaming, and what dreams I did have had a different texture. It was as if I was really alive in my dreams, and in actual places, and capable of coherent thought and action. On the mat things were really   happening. My body stopped working in pieces and became a unit. (I would later call this phenomenon ‘CBM’-Coordinated Body Motion). I lost my reaction time. Simply, there was no gap between thought and action. Techniques that I had thought unworkable became really   workable. One day I was freestyling with a fellow. He grabbed my arm and put in an awkward position and began pummeling my ribs. I couldn’t get loose, and he was really out of control. Bam! Bam! I felt like my ribs were going to break. Suddenly, nowhere to go, I had the strange feeling that my foot was a car stuffed into a shoe.

Then, as if through mist, I saw the end of my foot in a

kick. Then I had the strange sensation that I was outside of my body, in a far corner of the ceiling. Then I was just standing there, nobody pummeling me any longer, and the fellow who had been so pummeling was lying on the floor a dozen feet away. I felt dazed, and I asked what happened. ‘You kicked him,’ somebody said. After a minute, when my opponent was able to move again, the instructor 5

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

of the class came over to me and said, ‘You have to watch your control.’ But it was the other fellow that had been out of control, and, for the first time in my life The Art had protected me. I eventually received my Black Belt. This was a real belt, not one given by a school that entertains it’s students. And, when my instructor finally retired, I found that it was time to move on.

AIKIDO

(Aikido-The Way of Harmony in the spirit) I had been fascinated by Aikido for a number of years. I read all the articles and books on it, saw it in demonstrations, and my fascination just grew and grew. My time with the Kang Duk Won over, I decided to try some Aikido. That meant I had to take off my Black Belt and put on a White Belt, but that was okay. I signed up for a month at a school in Mountain View. By coincidence, the teacher’s name was Bob. For a month I attended classes. In that short month some interesting things occurred. In the dressing room I had a habit of talking to whoever I felt like. This included any Black Belts who happened to be around. The other White Belts, and a few of the Black Belts, looked at me oddly. It wasn’t like there was any written protocol, but people were supposed to be in awe of Black Belts. Finally, somebody asked me if I had studied anything. They were surprised to find out that I was a Black Belt myself. One night a couple of fellows stayed late to get in a little extra practice. They asked me if I wanted to stay. Sure, I said, not knowing what I was getting myself in for. These two were cowboys, with their own idea of what proper training was. ‘Let’s go full speed,’ one said joyfully. The other one ran at him and a technique was attempted. I say attempted because they didn’t have the skill to accomplish it. All they were really doing was engaging in something which I call ‘The  Joy of Combat.’ They were getting high on the action, and so what if somebody got hurt. ‘Come on,’ they prompted me. ‘I don’t think I want to do this,’ I answered. ‘Why not?’ and a short philosophical argument evolved. Finally, the art moving me, I said, ‘I’ll tell you why I don’t want to do this.’ I knelt in the Zen position and looked up at them. ‘Rush me.’ They rushed. I glowed and the room filled with my light. 6

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

One of them sheered off, the other one fell down. ‘That’s not what we meant,’ they protested. It was what I meant, however. After a month, even though I was learning and having fun, I knew I couldn’t study Aikido. I simply knew too much. After seven years in Karate I could absorb whatever techniques Aikido had to offer, being in a beginning class was eventually going to slow my learning curve, and I didn’t think an advanced class was going to be much better.

STICKY HANDS

While studying Aikido, a higher ranking Black Belt named Paul, asked me about Karate. I thought about it, then suggested that he should try an exercise called Sticky Hands. I had learned Sticky Hands while at the Kang Duk Won after receiving my Black Belt. The Kang Duk Won was not just Korean Karate, it was a Japanese Karate translated by Koreans with a Chinese influence. One of the influences was the exercise called ‘Chi Sao.’ Sticky Hands. Sticky Hands was an important part of Bruce Lee’s training, and is crucial to Wing Chun (Beautiful Springtime) Kung Fu. It is part of many Chinese arts. In Sticky Hands the students stand arm’s length apart and twine their wrists. Creating subtle circles, they try to penetrate each other’s defense. The trick is that you must not block hard, you must block soft. This means that you don’t ‘clunk’ arms, you give way and guide. When training with other people some people are better and some people aren’t. As promotions occur people can suddenly get better for a while, then another promotion occurs and you’re back to parity. I had reached Black Belt a while before my training partner, a fellow named Doug, did. I was better than him, then he achieved Black Belt and we rapidly became equal. Eventually, neither of us could penetrate the other’s defense, and we would merely batter our arms on each other’s blocks. Then I learned Sticky Hands. Bam! Bam! We punched and kicked, and suddenly I was past his defenses and punching his chest. Other people weren’t as effected by the exercise, but I found instant value in it. Then a couple of years later, I began showing Paul Sticky Hands, and as I was able to penetrate Karate with Sticky Hands, I found I could penetrate Aikido. And because of Karate, I could penetrate with power.

7

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING UNIVERSAL KARATE

I moved to Ukiah, a small town in northern California. Before I even had a place to live I had opened my first Karate school. I called it ‘Universal Karate.’ As I recall, the theory behind the name was that Karate should be able to be done by anybody. During this time I taught an abbreviated version of the Kang Duk Won. The Karate I had learned had been a mixture of some ten forms, which are listed in books on classical karate, and forms designed by Bob and the higher ranking students in San Jose. So why, you might ask, did I want to change the method I had been taught? After all, it worked, why change it? I sensed, you see, that there was something wrong. Now, with all sorts of twenty-twenty hindsight, I can tell you that it was the randomness of the system that was disturbing me. It was the lack of logic in the method. I had to find pieces that were missing. Back then, however, I only realized that I had two systems, and I wanted to take them apart. Bob had been able to place his finger through a board and leave a hole. But that type of technique didn’t interest me at all. Even

though

I

had

been

lured

by

power,

that

wasn’t

what

really

interested me. I cared about organizing the data that I had. I wanted to tear it apart. I had to tear it apart. And put it back together again. After turning out a couple of Black Belts at Universal Karate I decided to move on. Teaching was incredible, you always learn more through teaching, but it wasn’t providing me with the data I needed to ‘solve’ the martial arts.

SHAOLIN WEST

I moved to Santa Rosa, a town midway between San Francisco and Ukiah. I didn’t teach much, at first, but rather concentrated on developing my lists of techniques. I filled notebook after notebook with lists of techniques, trying to make sense out of all that I was learning. If there was a book published on the martial arts, I read it. If there was a tape, I saw it. I went to demonstrations. I talked to people. I asked questions. I began doing arts out of books. I did Pa Kua Chang (Eight Trigrams Palm Maneuvers) and Tai Chi Chuan (Grand Ultimate Fist), and many other arts. Though I was blindly blundering, my training at the Kang Duk Won had provided me with the means to make virtually any art work. And everything I did went into those notebooks. 8

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

Interestingly, though I never volunteered the information, people found out that I knew the martial arts. Invariably, they asked one question. ‘You’re a Master!’ I never claimed to be a Master. People just came up and started telling me I was. That’s cool. I was teaching a fellow with a couple of years experience in Tai Chi. One day he asked me if I knew ‘Push Hands.’ I hadn’t, so he proceeded to teach me. For fifteen minute he pushed me unmercifully. After fifteen minutes I figured it out, applied those concepts which were applicable, and began pushing him unmercifully.. I eventually opened a school, which I called ‘Shaolin West.’ Shaolin means ‘young forest,’ and is the name of a temple in China which is considered to be the birthplace of the martial arts. My theory was that I was starting a resurgence of the martial arts in the west. I never said I was not prideful. At Shaolin West I didn’t teach Karate, I taught my first checklist. I called it ‘Sixteen Step Self Defense.’ Now the checklist came in four specific parts, and this information is important if you’re going to understand the history of Matrixing. Karate

force

Kung Fu

force with flow

Tai Chi

flow with force

Aikido

flow

Do you understand this arrangement? There is only force and flow in the martial arts, and this can be used to isolate each art and relate it to each other art. And there are many other ways of arranging the arts. If one has a predilection towards Japanese arts, for instance, they could study: Karate  Jujit su Aikido

Or, if one wanted to matrix distances, they could study: stickfighting kickboxing wrestling

Really, it’s about deciding where you want to go as a martial artist, then being intelligent in your selection of a curriculum. To be honest, I could have started from scratch, built an art without using any of the classical arts. But people relate to the classical arts. Besides, one doesn’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. 9

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

One day I observed a fellow doing martial arts on the property behind my school. After class I went out and talked to him. He taught me Ton Toi (Springy Legs), which is a northern style of Kung Fu. I wrote my first article for Kick Illustrated. Kick, as I recall, eventually became ‘Inside Karate,’ which was one of the more important martial arts magazines during it’s time. I also wrote my first book, ‘The Master’s Handbook.’

Eventually, after turning out a few Black Belts, I realized that my method was not working. This was a ‘technique only’ type of curriculum, and there were serious gaps in my students abilities and knowledge. It was however, a grand try, and it provided me an immense amount of information. As far as I knew, nobody else was even remotely trying the things that I was trying, everybody else was just pushing the ‘monkey see-monkey do’ methods of classical martial arts. This meant I was either wacky, or a genius on the cutting edge.

OAKLAND

I moved to Oakland. I had taught martial arts everywhere I had lived, but Oakland was the one place where nobody wanted to learn martial arts. Interestingly, they had a theater downtown which showed nothing but martial arts movies. The theater was called the ‘Lux,’ and it showed three movies for two bucks. Unfortunately, for those prices bums came in and slept. I’d be trying to watch the movies and an amazingly pair of dirty feet would be draped over the seat next to me and loud snores would fill the air. People who couldn’t afford entertainment thought the Lux was the cat’s meow. Huge women with immense families would file into the place. All night long I would hear little heads being slapped, then during intermission, large thermoses of chicken soup would make their appearance. It was family night in Oakland.

THE ONE WEEK BLACK BELT COURSE

One day I was sitting around when the phone rang. ‘You want to come down and teach a bunch of fellows Karate?’ It was one of my former students. He was living in Los Angeles. When my wife got home the car was packed and I was ready to go. In Los Angeles I was put up in a huge house on Talmadge in Los Feliz. I interviewed a half dozen fellows, thought about what they wanted, then told them I could make them Black Belts in one week. Before you throw up your hands in disgust, I want you to think about a 10

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

few things. One, I was of the old school, where it had taken me over four years to get my belt, and I had suffered every minute. Two, I possessed data concerning the martial arts that no one in the world did concerning methods. Three, a week is forty hours. If you take a half hour private class twice a week for a year, you only have fifty-six hours of instruction. Four, the course was predicated upon the concept of pure information. It would be physical, but only to get across concepts. Five, and this is most important, have you ever observed a karate class? White Belts sweat just as much as Black Belts. They do the same amount of physical work. They don’t do it as well, but this is a matter of concentration and...information. As the fellows all worked during the day, we ran the class four hours a night for ten days, thus splitting the one week into two. The class was held in the attic of the house I was at. It was summer, and it was hot, hot, hot. One the guys lost twenty pounds in that two weeks. I used a form format, but combined it with parts of the checklist method I had used in Santa Rosa. For

two

weeks

we

sweated.

They

listened

patiently

as

I

explained

concepts, then put them to work. After two weeks I had actually created bona fide Black Belts. They could have walked into virtually any school and presented themselves as such. Interestingly, they could fight well. This was one of the things I was worried about. I didn’t want to turn out a bunch of paper tigers. So I had something that worked. There was, however, one huge problem with it. None of the students stuck with the martial arts, and their skills degraded accordingly. So I could make a bunch of fellows into Black Belts, but I couldn’t make them into life long artists. Back to the old drawing board. For the next few years I taught haphazardly. I experimented with an incredibly variety of methods, searching for one that would produce the exact results I required.

OUTLAW KARATE

While in LA that my son came of age. I had never forced either of my sons to do Karate, and now the eldest one actually wanted to study. I told him that he had to have a friend to work out with, and he found one. Then, on the night of his first class, one of my old students showed up. ‘I heard you were teaching again! Why didn’t you call me?’ 11

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

And another old student showed up. And then a total stranger. I had not announced any class, yet people were coming out of the wood work! We began the course with six students. We worked in the living room of my house, which was being used by my wife for a K-6 classroom. Twice a week we moved all the chairs and tables out and conducted our class. I put together a method which I called Outlaw Karate. It was ‘outside’ the accepted precepts of classical Karate, and designed to produce a Black Belt within one year. I had decided it was going to be a very hard class. It turned out to be the hardest class I ever taught. Mike had broken fingers for a solid year. He never missed a class.  Josh periodically ran out the door in frustration, only to show up f or the next class. Tracy cried every single class. And so on. Midway through the year we broke my son. He started wheezing and holding his chest. I took him to a doctor, and it turned out that we had broken his sternum. No karate for two months was the doctor’s orders. Aaron showed up for the next class. I kicked him out. He showed up for the next class and said, ‘You’re going to have to hurt me to keep me out.’ I let him stay. One night Bill was struck so hard he turned grey and started to die. We quickly applied a Scientology Assist and brought him back to life and continued the class. The results of this class were better than anything I had ever produced. The fellows started achieving CBM (Coordinated Body Motion) and experiencing the ‘sixth sense’ phenomenon that I had experienced at the Kang Duk Won. And they were life long artists. One day my son was walking to work. It was a bright, sunny morning, and he was dressed in a suit. As he passed the local hamburger stand two bums started begging from him. ‘Hey, man. got a quarter?’ One of the bums followed him, and the other one ran around the hamburger stand and prepared to jump my son. Aaron

was

backing

away

from

the

first

bum

when

the

second

one

launched himself from the top of a fence. Aaron felt the second bum coming and whirled to execute a front kick to the chin. The bum sailed away and hit a parking meter so hard that the pole bent. 12

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

The other bum grabbed Aaron’s shoulder. Aaron whirled under the grabbing arm in an Aikido move and executed an armlock. He then bounced the bum’s head between his knee and elbow until the bum was out cold. Looking around, Aaron realized that only five seconds has passed. Cars were driving by, birds were singing, and he was alone. He walked on. I learned several things from Aaron having been in a fight. One, Aaron was doing things I hadn’t shown him, he was working off concepts. Two, My method REALLY worked.

IM ARTS

I started a business to export my discoveries. I called my business IM Arts. As I recall, it stood for ‘Internal Martial Arts.’ The main product of this business was a series of books on Outlaw Karate, plus a collection of books on the various concepts of the martial arts. Over the next year I wrote some twenty instruction manuals and produced some twenty videos. I want to make a point here: I was still not happy with my analysis of the martial arts. I had a method that was superior to any other method in existence, but there were still problems that I hadn’t resolved. The result of my unsettled state was that my business didn’t do all that well. The end result was that I resolved to solve the martial arts, and to learn about writing and marketing that I might succeed in sharing my discoveries with the world. Thus far, I had written a few articles for the magazines. I began writing articles in earnest. To date I have written over thirty articles. And I have to tell you, there is a joy to writing an article and seeing it in print...and knowing that over 100,000 people will read it. One day, out of the blue, I wrote a column. And another one, and another one. by the time I was done I had written twelve columns, and had not planned any of them. They just burst out of me. I wrote a letter to the editor I had been working with, John Soet, at Inside Karate, and enclosed the twelve columns. Suddenly I was a columnist! For four years I sweated over that column. It would burst out of me, then I would rewrite and rewrite it and rewrite it. I wanted it to be perfect. It was a unique column, in that it blended humor with lessons, and I think it was one of the best columns ever run by that magazine, or any other magazine. Of course I might be biased. Nah. At any rate, I was now a professional writer, and I started to understand some of the things that have to be considered when marketing a magazine. I realized, at this time, that the martial arts world had changed. People weren’t as interested in the philosophy as they had been when I first started 13

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

studying. When I started people were interested in the ‘sixth sense’ and things of a ‘Zen’ nature, now they weren’t. Also, when I had started only people with a diehard interest in the martial arts studied. There weren’t many schools, and the schools that there were specialized in sweat and blood. Now people were being lured off the streets by the offer of free uniforms and the exploits of their cinematic heroes. The martial arts had become a business. Kids with no purpose were kept entertained that the school might stay open. Adults with no purpose were sold on programs that promised a Black Belt. The general tenor of people just had no purpose being in school. The result was that Black Belt standards, in spite of the incredible tournament abilities of a few, was being lowered. I learned something else from my writing experiences. People were interested in such things as diet and weightlifting. They were more interested in science. This meant that people were being corrupted away from the paranormal to a science that is only a substitute for the science of the martial arts. I would read an article on building the better biceps so you could have that dynamite punch. But the biceps is a retractive muscle, not a punching muscle! And weight lifting was divorced from the energy systems necessary to the martial arts. When weightlifting one isolates a muscle (group) and works on it. But to CBM (Coordinated Body Motion) one must learn to use the muscles together. This meant that weightlifting, as it is currently practiced, OPPOSES the martial arts. It doesn’t have to, and I am sure that there are people out there who are making inroads on the relationship of weightlifting to the martial arts.

AL CASE MARTIAL ARTS ACADEMY

After the hardest class I ever taught, I was persuaded to open another school. I did so in Tujunga, California, and named the school the ‘Al Case Martial Arts Academy.’ At this school I had students helping me, so I opened up the curriculum. I taught Outlaw Karate, but also held classes in Tai Chi and Pa Kua and whatever else I felt like. To be honest, I was already taking pieces of my arts apart and rearranging them, searching for the truth of the arts.

On the average, once a month an insane person would walk into the school. These varied from the incomprehensible to the dangerous. Over the years I had had many people come into my school, some of them in uniform, to ‘challenge the master.’ I never let any of these people start a fight, but it was interesting 14

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

watching my student’s reaction to these jerks. One day a fellow walked in and started bad mouthing everybody from Bruce Lee to the guy down the street. It turned out he was an instructor from the next town. He had taken it upon himself to welcome me to town, and to badmouth every art and instructor he could. I always wonder what he said about me. One day a fellow walked in and asked about courses. It turned out that he had more years in the martial arts than I did, and we ended up exchanging arts. I taught him what I knew, and he taught me Fut Ga, which is a southern Shaolin style of Kung Fu. One day a fellow walked in with nearly ten years of experience in Pa Kua. We showed each other our arts, and we complimented each other, and he left. Interestingly, he never tumbled to the fact that I was not classically trained. Eventually, I tired of the school. I wasn’t any closer to finding the truth of the martial arts, I wasn’t making any money, so I decided to close it. Interestingly, many students demanded that I continue to teach them. I turned my garage into a dojo and have been teaching there ever since. I have taught everywhere. I have taught in basements and attics. I have taught on rooftops and back alleys. I have had big storefronts and small holesin-the-wall. I have found, out of all those experiences, that teaching out of my garage is the most pleasurable. I don’t have to put up with people who don’t have any purpose. I don’t have to put up with the once-a-month crazies that used to wander in and challenge me. I don’t have to put up with money worries, and my house becomes a write off. In short, I only accept the people that I want, and my art is high enough caliber that there is always someone to teach.

MATRIX MARTIAL ARTS

I started receiving Scientology auditing. Scientology auditing is designed to help you get rid of the things that stop you. After thirty years in the martial arts, and nearly fifty years of life, I had a lot of things that stopped me. After the auditing I tossed out my notebooks. Hundreds of notebooks, filled with amazing amounts of data. It was the smartest thing I could have done. I began looking at the martial arts with a new, fresh viewpoint. The more auditing I got, the more I stopped stopping myself, and the clearer things became. I believe it’s in the Tao that Lao Tse says, ‘To know yourself is to know your enemy.’ 15

HOW I DEVELOPED MATRIXING

I stopped being my enemy. I decided to solve the martial arts. First,

I

listed

every

technique

I

knew.

After

thirty

years,

I

knew

thousands of them. Then I went through dozens of tapes, listing every single technique that I did not already have written down. When I was done I had a massive list. I wrote each technique out on the back of a business card. At the top of the card I wrote what attack would cause that defense to be used. I started arranging the cards. I subdivided the cards according to attack. Then I arranged the cards under each attack according to art. Finally, with thousands of cards littering my living room floor, I began to compare the techniques. Duplicates were tossed out. Unworkable techniques (such as when the attacker poses momentarily so you can finish the technique) were tossed out. Techniques that lacked in CBM (Coordinated Body Motion) were tossed out. When I was finally done I was down to about seventy techniques. That’s right, seventy techniques. And I knew that was stretching it. I arranged the final techniques into one art, which I called ‘The Perfect Art.’ I began teaching the art. The first student I taught The Perfect Art to completed the thing in about a month. He had no problem with the concepts because everything made sense. One technique led to the next, and the next, and the next. There was just no way to argue against the arrangement of purely workable techniques. I had found the truth of the martial arts.

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