Matt Thornton, the coach's coach!
It was early in 1998 that I had the first opportunity to meet Matt Thornton. He was on his way to Reunion Island to conduct a seminar for Daniel Duby (Savate instructor). I had heard about Matt through Steve Boyd, a friend of mine in the United States. He had nothing but praise for Matt and his coaching methods and through this I was convinced on bringing him out to my gym to conduct a seminar, although we could say that Matt was unknown at that time.

Matt Thornton, the coach’s coach!
It was early in 1998 that I had the first opportunity to meet Matt Thornton. He was on his way to Reunion Island to conduct a seminar for Daniel Duby (Savate instructor). I had heard about Matt through Steve Boyd, a friend of mine in the United States. He had nothing but praise for Matt and his coaching methods and through this I was convinced on bringing him out to my gym to conduct a seminar, although we could say that Matt was unknown at that time.

Over the years I had trained with many well-known instructors of the martial arts. I was beginning to become disillusioned and thought I would never find anyone who had the same mind set as I did. What I found time and time again, where people who thought they where better than everyone else, where titles where more important than performance and people who never actually played the game but yet they where teaching you how to fight.

After the first day with Matt I realized that here was a person who was not interested in titles, rituals or hierarchy. He was articulate and was able to perform what he was coaching you. He came down to my gym and sparred and wrestled with all my students, without hesitation. This meant allot to me as it really takes someone without and ego and a person who understands and has confidence in his very own performance to be able to do this.

What I have learnt from this experience is that you need to train with the right people. Just because someone is famous and has his face on a magazine does not mean that he can actually do what he says. Just because someone writes prophetic words does not mean that he actually lives by them. I think we all have to be careful that we don’t just chase the so-called stars of the martial arts. In many cases I have found that these people are just seeking the limelight but actually can’t do a thing they say.

Your coach is one of the most important ingredients in your martial art training. And this is what he should be a coach, not someone who is more interested in himself. There are many instructors but very few coaches. Coaches are directly concerned with your continues improvement as an athlete and as a human being. Four years later and I am still training with Matt. It is a constant learning experience and he is a constant inspiration for me to improve. This is what a coach means to me. More importantly Matt has the unique ability to articulate what he coaches, this is a rare occurrence these days, someone who actually does what he says.

I have taken this insert from Matt Thornton’s web site, if you would like to find out more about his philosophy on coaching the martial arts you can check out his web site at http://www.straightblastgym.com

Some Thoughts on the travelogue of "life":
I want to begin this piece by drawing a clear and unadulterated analogy between the "martial arts" as practiced within the Straight Blast Gym and the bigger picture of "life" in general.
Obviously, anything that is true will be manifested in very similar ways in all kinds of different avenues, fields, and spectrums. To steal a term from Theodore Roosevelt, a "truism" will apply in any field, which is why it’s called a truism.
The ideal of what we do, indeed the ideal espoused by Bruce Lee in all his writings as it pertained Jeet Kune Do, was to reach a level beyond "style", beyond partialization, and compartmentalization. A level where the athlete/ fighter simply "was" and expressed himself, as opposed to expressing a "style", system, or method. I believe this conceptual idea of what the perfect fighter would be has become a reality in modern times with the advent of No Holds Barred competitions.
For the first time in modern memory fighters are being created that have no limits in terms of partialized styles, or methods. They can fight on their feet, in the clinch and on the ground. The flow smoothly from boxing to wrestling to submission without thought of what "style" they are now expressing. Indeed they are not really expressing any one style but instead are adjusting to the aggressive energy feed to them by their resisting opponent. I don’t know how you could ever come any closer to the freedom and ideal state of being that Bruce talked and wrote about, and I do not believe anyone could logically argue against this point.
Please keep in mind as well that this "ideal" that was espoused as "Jeet Kune Do" was taken directly from the writings and discussions of a well-known teacher and lecturer of the time, Krishnamurti. This acknowledgement is not meant to diminish Bruce’s contribution at all. On the contrary, it is a true reflection of Bruce’s genius that he was able to see how any truth /"truism" can transfer, and translate from one field into another.
Having said all that, (and hoping that the point made was clear and simple enough), lets move on. Now that I believe we have reached the potential to actualise the Martial Art ideal of JKD in a very real and physical sense, how do we then translate that back into everyday life? After all, if this idea of training is indeed a truism then it should be relatable in all other aspects of life in general.
One simple way to begin that process is to retrace our steps as taken within the field of physical training and juxtapose them as steps towards a philosophical truth. I have decided to write a detailed explanation of such a comparison first, followed by a simplified step-by-step progression and chart towards the end. It should go without saying that this comparison and analogy is my own and reflects my own experiences and thoughts. You would be a fool to simply follow my path or anyone else’s (although it is this type of mindless mimicry that gets passed of for organized religion these days). Your truth should be reflected by your experiences, not mine. Perhaps this article can help you define your journey in clearer terms, and it is my hope that it does. But be forewarned, reading about anyone else’s journey whether its by your favourite philosopher, religious prophet, saint, hero, writer, artist, or local trash collector, can never serve as a substitute for your own personal trials, tribulations, and peak experiences.
In 1964 a Psychologist by the name of Dr Abraham Maslow wrote a small book titled "Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences". In that book Dr Maslow espoused a very simple idea, that religious experiences, be they Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, etc, could be explained, understood, and experienced by anyone using the tools of modern science, and common sense. Although this may have seemed "radical" at the time, it was of course an ancient idea (as all truisms are). Even so this simple idea is still considered extreme, and even blasphemous by many religious conservatives (much as JKD is viewed by "traditional" martial artists).
Maslow divided up religious people into two very distinct categories (again I am using very broad and simplified generalizations of his work based on MY interpretations, you should read his work yourself!) The "mystical" ones, prophets, heroes, etc, and the legalistic, or organizational people. Every major religion in the world started with the private, lonely, personal illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of a prophet or seer. Maslow called the experiences, or revelations that these prophets or seers had "peak experiences".
To quote Maslow,

"The characteristic prophet is a lonely man who has discovered his truth about the world, the cosmos, ethics, God, and his own identity, from his own personal experiences, from what he would consider to be a revelation. Usually, perhaps always, the prophets of the high religions have had these experiences when they were alone."

"Characteristically the abstraction type of the legalist ecclesiastic is the conserving organization man. An officer and arm of the organization, who is loyal to the structure of the organization which has been built up on the basis of the prophets original revelation in order to make the revelation available to the masses. These organizations can be seen as a kind of punch card or IBM version of an original revelation or mystical experience to make it suitable for group use and administrative convenience."

What separated Maslow from many others is that he believed everyone was capable of having "peak experiences". That everyone had within themselves the makings of a "prophet", saint, or hero. Indeed Maslow argued that even without trying virtually every human being has had at one point in time a "mystical" or "peak" experience. Much of his research confirmed this belief and is interesting reading. Occasionally he would run into someone who denied ever having had a peak experience. What he came to realize was that these people were very materialistic, rational, mechanistic, anal retentive and obsessed with control. These where people whose greatest fear was a complete loss of control or a sense of being overwhelmed by emotion. As such, they desperately hang on to some form of stability, control, reality, etc. For such an obsessive person who is so scared of being overwhelmed by an emotion (which is interpreted as a loss of control) peak experiences are scary. Maslow realized that even these people had had mystical experiences, they just denied them. He refers to such people as "non peakers". I believe Maslow explained the distinction between these two types of people best when he wrote this brilliant statement:

"If you look closely at the internal history of most of the worlds religions, you will find that each one very soon tends to divide into a left wing and a right wing. That is, into the peakers (those who except ’peak experiences’) the mystics, the transcenders, or the privately religious people, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, into those who concretise the religious symbols and metaphors. The people who worship little pieces of wood rather then what the object stands for. Those who take verbal formulas literally, forgetting the original meaning of these words, and, perhaps most important, those who take organization, the church, as primary and as more important than the prophet and his original revelations. These men, like many organization men who tend to rise to the top in any complex bureaucracy, tend to be non-peakers rather then peakers."

"The cleavage between the mystics and the legalists remains at best a kind of mutual tolerance, but it has happened in some churches that the rulers of the organization actually made heresy out of the mystic experiences and persecuted the mystics themselves. This may be an old story in the history of religion, but I must point out that it is also an old story in other fields as well."
Now lets take a step back and draw a clear comparison between what we know of the TRUTH of Martial Arts and what Maslow calls peak experiences. The first basic tenant I teach at the Straight Blast Gym is the abandonment of ritual, titles, and terminology. For those of you who have read our other philosophy sections you will recognize that as the fourth principle ’Attitude & Philosophy’. From the point of view of the combat athlete, the ritual, dogma, styles, and symbols found within the world of ’traditional organized Martial Arts "styles"’ serve little use beyond how they directly translate into his/her own personal PERFORMANCE. As the athlete grows and punches in plenty of hours on the timecard of ALIVE training the development of ones own personal style becomes apparent. It is that personal style that is in the end true JKD. Anything less then that becomes meaningless mimicry of another persons level of performance, having little to no bearing, or reality, within the real world of violent combat.
Lets compare that with what Maslow says about how peakers view the ritual, organizations, and dogma of traditional organized religion:

"From the point of view of the peak experiencer, each person has his own private religion. This develops out of his own personal revelations in which are revealed to him his own private myths and symbols, rituals and ceremonies. These may be of the profoundest meaning to him personally and yet completely idiosyncratic, i.e., of no meaning to anyone else."

From the point of view of a fighter, you can gain ideas and a certain understanding from watching, listening to, or reading about other fighters. However, you can never become a fighter, or gain the ability to actually fight, unless you have the balls to venture forth and actually fight yourself. This is true no matter how great a fighter your teacher was, or is. This is what we mean by ALIVE training. You must experience this aliveness yourself; you cannot do it vicariously through attachment to another.

The clear, distinct, obvious and common sense comparison that can be made to religion itself should now go unspoken. If you are still confused read the above paragraph then simply replace the word fighter with mystic, the word fight with peak experience, and the word teacher with Church.

In closing let me just remind you of a simple point, Christ wasn’t a Christian, Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist, and Mohammed wasn’t a Muslim. These organized creations of other men came about after their death, and with them came the titles, rituals, and terminologies, which created a separation of dogma. The terminology, the ’word’ printed and bound, became the thing. As Krishnamurti said, "the name is not the thing". Shakespeare doesn’t exist inside the ink on the page, the soul doesn’t exist within DNA, and god cannot be found in a book.
Titles, terminology and ritual. . .sound familiar yet?

If you look deeply within all the original teachings within all the worlds’ major religions you will find similarities within all their "truths". Of course this must be so, truth cannot, does not belong to any nation, people, group, country, or man. Truth is universal and thus will be found in everything.

Peakers/ Fighters/ Experiencers creativity, evolution, light, experience, growth:
ALIVENESS Non peakers/ practitioners/ critics entropy, death, darkness, reification: DEAD PATTERNS
Taking responsibility for your own life. Living life on your own terms. Looking within you for strength. Looking within for a sense of worth and validation. Confronting and overcoming fear. Realizing the inner motivations. Confronting the Ego. A death with few regrets, and the Knowledge of true love, beauty, triumphs, and humanity. Avoiding personal responsibility. Following another’s rules, way. Looking to others/ groups, for strength. Looking to others for their opinion of your worth for validation. Avoiding and living with/in fear. Repressing the inner motivations. Hiding from the ego. Meeting death having lived ones whole life bound by the same chains of fear.

.- Matt Thornton

-Rodney King
-Rodney "Chico" King
http://www.streetbrawl.co.za

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