“That’s why the mental toughness conditioning is important. As you get kicked or hit, and it starts to hurt, it forces you to focus on yourself instead of what you should be thinking about. It breaks you out of the place you want to be in. Not the void.”
That made sense. I asked Greg about the spiritual side of fighting. Did he think there were a lot of things in the traditional martial arts that were good for MMA?
“The problem is, the traditional guys are holding on to their outmoded techniques. They’ve been doing reverse punches for twenty-five years. You’re going to come and tell them they wasted their time? But all those traditionalists maintain the spirituality of what they do is tied to their art, that there’s no separation between the two. But it’s these jerks that have intertwined Zen and their old techniques, and so you say ‘oh, it’s all bullshit,’ it doesn’t work. It’s no one’s fault but the guys who won’t let it go.
“I think we’ll come back to it. Someday we’ll say ‘oh, these guys practiced for two thousand years, and they weren’t stupid, there are lessons there.’ I’m not going to go to war with a musket, but the lessons can be learned. It’s the same bullet but a different gun.”
We’ve all heard of “the zone,” that heightened mental state in which we perform perfectly. I think I first heard it in discussion of basketball players, who would get hot and sink ten shots in a row, ‘feeling it,’ and ‘in the zone’; probably in those old interviews with Michael Jordan when he would pin fifty points on the Knicks. It’s a kind of a relaxed supercompetence, a place where you aren’t nervous and make every shot, every right decision. You had it in postgame interviews: “I was in the zone,” the athlete would say. That explained it.
A professor at the University of Chicago named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Chek-sent-mi-hi, I think) wrote the definitive book of the zone, though he called it the “flow.” Csikszentmihalyi gathered up twenty-five years of research and interviews and evidence for his 1990 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience , and the concept began to work its way into popular discussion, ESPN analysis, and sports radio.
I feel there is some connection here between the zone, and the eureka hunt, and the void that Greg was talking about. Being in the groove, that athletic place of peak performance, when the hitter can see the stitches on the baseball, when time slows down for a fighter and the left hook materializes out of nowhere and connects . . . it all seems related, these flashes of deeper understanding.
It’s almost like using “the Force” from the Star Wars movies —but this is relaxing and letting go into muscle memory and action. Obi Wan says, “the Force flows through you.” We talk about it all the time, in sports, even playing pool at the local bar, you’ll run the table and laugh about being in the zone. The balls are just falling. Josh Waitzkin wrote about it in his Art of Learning, about “building triggers” to more easily fall into that state of easy attunedness. There’s a chapter every fighter and trainer should read—about creating rituals to stay calm and clear before a fight. It reminded me of what Mark DellaGrotte intuitively understood, the fighter needs to feel relaxed and confident, his energies brought to bear on only one thing.
I got in touch with Jonah Lehrer in Boston and asked him about a connection between his article on insight and “the zone.” He wanted to clarify a few things.
“Not the right brain per se. There is a lot of pop science out there about the right brain-left brain split, and the insight circuit is very interesting to me because it conforms to this cliché we have about the right brain being more intuitive and artistic and all the rest—but in general—the right brain is not necessarily always better at unconscious intuitve thought.
“Not right brain but the emotional brain I think is a better way to say it. Not just on the right side.
“When you talk about how athletes are thinking and the importance of not overthinking what you’re doing, it’s less about relying on the right brain than it is turning off the prefrontal cortex, the rational circuit behind your eyes—and relying more on the emotional brain, the intuitive, instinctive emotional brain.
“For a baseball player, how you hit a fastball going ninety-five miles an hour seems impossible, technically. The brain shouldn’t be able to react that fast—you add up the time it takes from when the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand to when the batter swings, technically you can’t move that fast—yet obviously batters hit fastballs. So batters begin their swing before the ball is released, so they’re relying on implicit unconscious cues, signals they’re not close to aware of, body language, torque on wrist. Hitters pick up on that in nonconscious all-implicit ways—if they think too much it becomes paralyzing.
“Think about it this way. The emotional unconscious brain, the primitive brain we share with other animals, has been perfected by evolution for the last two hundred million years. It’s like a very efficient supercomputer with all the bugs worked out. And then we’ve got the rational prefrontal cortex, which is ten million years old, so it’s relatively new. It’s like software version one-point-oh. It has bugs and makes mistakes. It’s what lets us do algebra, and reflect, and what makes us uniquely human, but it’s small and you don’t want to rely on it for complex movement.”
I started reading one of the sports psychology textbooks, Applied Sport Psychology, edited by Jean M. Williams. The guys at the Army Center for Enhanced Performance had told me to read it as a primer.
Poring over it, I thought to myself, “Geez, this is all really obvious. Athletes that think more positively, do better. Duh.” And it is—sports psychology is fairly simple and self-explanatory. But the important thing to do is to realize it is obvious and make use of it. The conscious mind is simpler than you think; if you direct it, you can get better results. That’s the basis of sports psychology, there’s not a great mystery. The strategies are simple but labor intensive—make detailed lists of goals, not only in the short term but in the long. Enhance positive thinking with positive imagery—like Randy Couture, don’t think in negatives, give yourself positive stuff to work for. Not “don’t give up the takedown” but “get that underhook.” Basically, take and develop the habits that successful top-flight athletes use.
I dug through the textbook for the “peak performance” chapters. The researchers take the experience of the zone, or whatever you want to call it, and quantify it through hard work and statistical analysis of athletes’ responses. Although many athletes describe this euphoric feeling as involuntary, there is consensus among sports psychologists that this state can be achieved more often through analysis. Certainly elite athletes get there more often.
When Applied Sport Psychology describes peak performance, here are the notes it hits:• Loss of fear—no fear of failure
• No thinking of performance
• Total immersion in activity
• Narrow focus of attention
• Effortless performance—not forcing it
• Feeling of being in complete control
• Time/space disorientation (usually slowed down)
• Universe perceived to be integrated and unified
• Unique, temporary, involuntary experience
These were common experiences described and collated by psychologists studying thousands and thousands of athletes, bringing together many studies. When I read through some of the literature on the zone and peak performance, and started to get a feel for what these athletes were going through, that line about the universe “perceived to be integrated and unified” caught my eye—that was some hippy dippy shit right there. C’mon, really, the universe is unified? In a textbook? It sounds like Eastern mysticism. Flow like a river, touching the leaf, step by step I quiet the babbling brook . . .
It occurred to me that what is Zen in martial arts but an earlier, far more exhaustive, study of sports psychology? Sports psychology as a genuine field of study has existed for only twenty or thirty years; Musashi represents a tradition of study that covers hundreds of years, if not
millennia. Greg Jackson’s depiction of the void sounded suspiciously like getting in the zone to me, and so I reread Musashi and some others, Zen in the Art of Archery (recommended by both Renzo and Greg Jackson) and The Life-Giving Sword by a contemporary of Musashi’s, Yagyu Munenori. Here were writers and practitioners who had devoted lifetimes of study to problems that their caste had already devoted hundreds of years of study to, tested in actual combat, to the death.
The reason Zen and that Eastern philosophy is often pooh-poohed by fighters is that it sounds like bullshit. Pat Miletich had a fighter who studied Musashi and Pat thought that was his biggest problem—too much thinking.
The Western reader pretends there may be shortcuts to mastery, mysterious shortcuts. There’s the Karate Kid idea—a few months of study, a few words of wisdom, and you can beat a black belt. Even the recent kids’ flick Kung Fu Panda had the hero realize the secret, and then he could beat anybody. A lot of kung-fu movies have this idea of the philosophy trumping the physical. It’s a misunderstanding of Musashi, that if you adopt that proper philosophy and “be like water” or “fear nothing,” you don’t need to practice ten hours a day for fifteen years. It’s something that kung-fu movies with their trampolines and deafening punch noises pushed on the world, and it’s attractive. Everybody loves a shortcut. Plus it makes a good movie narrative—a clueless hero gets beat up, studies for a few months, has a deep philosophical revelation, and emerges as a genuine badass.
That’s all bullshit. As Miletich says, you have to take a lot of beatings.
Everyone I talked to, everyone I read, studied their own art obsessively. And all the Zen writing repeated this sentiment. “Much patience, much heartbreaking practice is needed, just as in archery. But once this practice has led to the goal the last trace of self-regard vanishes in sheer purposelessness” (from Zen in the Art of Archery).
Musashi says, “You must practice this” about every other sentence—a lifetime of study is not enough.
Josh Waitzkin spoke about Marcelo Garcia rolling with the “most beautiful chi” he’d ever seen. Now, Marcelo doesn’t study tai chi, and yet he rolls with it, because his level of mastery is so far advanced that he has internalized those concepts; he plays his game. It’s like the great boxers who can uncoil like springs and hit harder than men three times their weight—they haven’t studied anything but boxing but their level of mastery is so high they intuitively do those things that Musashi talks about. There are no shortcuts but a lifetime of study. There are no easy ways but obsession.
But during that journey, that lifetime of study, one can recognize and feel these routes to the zone or the void. It’s part of mastery. You can’t start there, but you need to end up there. “Athletes who learn to be confident, focus their attention on the task at hand, control their anxiety, and have appropriate and challenging goals may experience flow and peak performance more often,” says the textbook. There’s an often-quoted Zen saying: “Enlightenment is an accident, but you can have more accidents.”
Zen koans (those odd little stories) are in some ways about that—cutting you loose from your reasoning brain, the part filled with conscious thought and narration, tied up in the past and future and too slow to be useful in a fight. The koans don’t make sense, on purpose. Those Zen masters are trying to get you away from you prefrontal cognitive reasoning brain, into the mysteries of the emotional and intuitive side. The wiser side, the big-picture side. Dan Gable throwing apples was a version of the Zen koan—he’s teaching you a lesson, but first you have to come to the understanding on your own. What was the lesson? The same lesson Teddy Atlas was talking about when he said, “At a certain point, if he’s going to get to the top of the boxing profession, a fighter has to learn the difference between a truth and a lie. The lie is thinking that submission is an acceptable option. The truth is that if you give up, afterward you’ll realize that any of those punches that you thought you couldn’t deal with, or those rough moments you didn’t think you would make it through, were just moments.” Pain is an illusion.
Zen in the Art of Archery was written by a German, Eugen Herrigel, who spent many years in Japan learning the practice of Zen through the study of archery. He wrote: “Zen is akin to pure introspective mysticism. Unless we enter into mystic experiences by direct participation, we remain outside, twist and turn as we may. This law . . . allows no exceptions . . . Like all mysticism, Zen can only be understood by one who is himself a mystic and is therefore not tempted to gain by underhand methods what the mystical experience withholds from him.”
You’ve got to wonder a little bit at the translations from Japanese to German to English, but I started to understand the Zen koan—deliberate mysteriousness.
So that’s why the stories sound so magical and bullshity, because they have to be. They have to be somewhat mysterious—and you need to take that on as a reader, internalize it; to explain it would defeat the purpose. The purpose? I can’t tell you, that would destroy it, but in some ways it’s an embrace of mystery, at least in part. A strategy to help you move away from your tightly focused left brain. There’s a reason that a lot of high-level jiu-jitsu guys smoke pot and roll.
We can revisit that old discussion of where to look in a fight—at his eyes or at his body? At the “T” of his chest? Musashi talks about the dangers of looking to only one place, even the eyes, because it limits you. If one place is stared at, the enemy can deceive you. Instead, Musashi favors looking through the opponent, “your stare should be unfixed . . . I think only of making the hit. I have no preconceived notions of which target is the one to aim for. I let nature take it’s course and permit the spirit of the thing itself to express itself through me and make me the victor.”
It’s important to remember what Musashi was talking about—cutting another man with a sword, a man who is trying to cut you. Those legendary blades were incredibly sharp, horribly dangerous, and the duels had no margin for error.
Freddie Roach, the boxing trainer, told me, “Well, if you just stare at one thing you’re gonna get killed. It’s not realistic. As a fighter I see a whole picture of the fighter in front of me. I know when his feet move, I know when his hands move, he feints . . . it’s a general picture. If you’re looking at his feet he’s gonna fucking kill you, I don’t care what you say.” And then he laughed his dry raspy laugh.
“You don’t think about it,” he continued. “You react and explode and it’s automatic. I can’t say I’m going to land one-two of a four-punch combination and realistically mean it. I won’t land all four shots, but one punch will develop the next, and you don’t know what that first punch developed until you’re there. You become so accustomed to reacting to what your opponent does with that move, that now it comes natural. You don’t have to think about it. Feel for it.”
You can see that Freddie and Musashi are saying the same thing. And again there are no shortcuts or mysteries. These abilities come only with endless practice. Once you’ve devoted a lifetime to study then the important thing is to get out of your own way and not screw yourself up by thinking.
Herrigel describes the Zen experience, and it sounds just like being in the zone. “The soul is brought to the point where it vibrates of itself in itself—a serene pulsation which can be heightened into the feeling, otherwise experienced only in rare dreams, of extraordinary lightness, and the rapturous certainty of being able to summon up energies in any direction, to intensify or to release tensions graded to a nicety.
“This state, in which nothing definite is thought, planned, striven for, desired or expected, which aims in no particular direction and yet knows itself capable alike of the possible and the impossible, so unswerving is its power—this state, which is at bottom purposeless and egoless . . . can work its inexhaustible power because it is free.”
Although the realization of similarities between the zone and Zen was a revelation to me, the ideas had been floating around for years. Andrew Cooper wrote an interesting book, called Playing in
the Zone, and he wrote (from a far deeper Zen perspective) about the overlap between Zen and the zone. When I asked Greg Jackson to read this, he called me later to say with typical humility, “I must not have explained myself very well, because that’s what I was talking about.” Greg is way too nice a guy to ever say “duh.”
I came across a clip of Dr. Michael Lardon talking about the “old samurai” and the similarities between mushin no shin (Musashi’s “the mind of no-mind”) and the zone experience.
Dr. Lardon is a celebrity sports psychiatrist, writing books, doing TV shows, and working with all sorts of top athletes—Olympians, pro golfers including David Duval, all kinds. But he’s no empty suit; he’s thoroughly accredited, a serious scientist and doctor, and a man with boundless enthusiasm and interest. There’s a reason all these top-level professional golfers come to him.
Dr. Lardon’s personal history drew me like a beacon. He’d been one of the best sixteen-year-old Ping-Pong players in the nation and had been sent to Japan to train in 1976. He told me the story over the phone—one of those stories he uses all the time, to good effect.
“I was training with a world champion, at Senshu University outside of Tokyo where we worked alongside martial artists, so I was exposed to a lot of the traditional martial arts, peripherally. There was this huge language barrier, but observationally . . . I would watch these martial artists do amazing things. I was fascinated with the idea of how they were training their brains, and what transfer of energy it allowed them to do. They were doing so much with mental focus . . . one of them even told me you must leave no trace of yourself.” One can imagine the impact that might have on a sixteen-year-old boy, far from home.
“In table tennis, you generate potential energy into kinetic, the ball comes out at ninety miles per hour and hits the table, spin takes hold on the bounce, and the ball shoots out at a hundred miles per hour or more in any direction . . . and you have to touch just the top of the ball. If it hits your racket straight up you can never control it. At Colorado Springs [the Olympic Center] a few years ago they tested reaction times of all the Olympic athletes and the table tennis players had the fastest time, no surprise—it’s an eight-foot table and the ball is moving at a hundred miles per hour. It necessitates completely instinctual play, if you used your cognition at all, and thought about the shot, you couldn’t hang.”
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