Side 2
Excerpt from the written part to the exam to the 5.Level Master Wing Tsun of Sifu Marcus Schüssler......
Right now we play further: you now displace yourself at any location and now re-establish a ‚pleasant' distance or security zone. At this very moment when you execute the displacement your partner follows and tries to keep the attained distance in its perimeter means he does not let it get bigger again and tries to keep the same distance all the time. Now you go on with that continous and dynamically changing routine for some time.
If we now analyse this exercise we recognise that we follow continously the expression of the ‚flight reflex' from neurophysiology whereas the partner is consistantly the ‚threat'. Who of you two felt himself in a position of superiority first of all psychologically? Rather your partner than you yourself. This phenomenon is simply explained:
while you yourself have to concentrate during the flight (most probably backwards!) on numerous things than your threatening adversary (there is a continous on-going checking in your mind: is my rescue route free, do I keep my security perimeter stable, can I increase my distance, can I keep my balance, and so on) he only has to concentrate on primarily two things: he has to concentrate on you and on his own advancing because he has everything in his vision forward. Already from this fact it is much more reasonable to be a threat or better an attacker!
What has all this in common with Chi-Sao? Let us return to the situation of the executed palm attack: after the palm attack has been executed and been neutralised by the partner we came clear that it is not clever to cease the pressure or better the ‚threatening readyness to attack' as the partner could use this positively for himself to bring us into a threatened position ourselves. Apart from this a readyness to attack must be maintained at all time because when the partner suddely pulls his arm out of the line we must shoot forward without any thinking and hesitation. If now the partner does not want to cease his ‚threatening readyness to attack' himself after his deflection so he also has to execute a pressure forward. If now both partners follow this principle intelligently both persons execute pressure. Based upon this logic the existance of a zero pressure Wing Tsun is not given however the existance of a powerless Wing Tsun possible. Because felt power (by this power of the body musculinity is meant) is only a subjective perception of our muscular contractions. Unfortunately we are still not able to feel the muscular contractions of other human beings so we can only perceive by the means of our own body resistance. And these are to be minimized by Chi-Sao which means to reduce any resistance! Here the taoist philosophy had a great impact on the structure of technique because Chi-Sao teaches us to get to know the taoism in its physical form, to experience it and to change ourselves through it.
As explained at the beginning this process of realizing taoism takes years in order to receive the merits for a change. Coming along is also a mental change attached to the maturing of a person. For example the teaching periods of Yip Man in HongKong were divided into several stages where some of his original students were brought up and who differ very much in their approaches among themselves. This can be brought back to the fact that even Yip Man proceeded his own personal evolvements physically and mentally and that the at a time actual experiences were passed on to his students. His own process of evolvement never stopped.....
