Illuminate me
How do you do it? You, who are outside my head. And especially you, at the other end of the piste. Do you just wait for something to spring to mind... something intelligible. Or a music... Or is there a rule you consciously follow in order to generate the required move? Do you wait for the question to force your unconscious to answer? How long can you wait?
En garde: Consciousness, mind I don't wonder off. Ready: What will I do if she/he does what I think she/he may do if she/thinks that I'm going to try to do what she/he... Fence: Zut! She's gone again.
One thing is clear to me: attempting to control the direction of a bout seems to be counterproductive. But have you ever tried NOT to control the direction of a bout?
Our brains make predictions continuously and automatically as part of the survival mechanism that control and monitor our bodies. You unconsciously predict where your arm will end up after you move it. A Very complicated computation. You do this by generating short-term, constantly upgraded guesses about where your arm will be by combining information about the world and the movement you're about to initiate. These guesses are followed by new information about where your arm actually ended up, which confirm or contradict your predictions. Your brain compares the past-movement reality and the pre-movement belief and adjusts the predictions to make your movement a little more skilful and fluid.
YOUR movement! Mine is stuck in this iper-conscious mental glue all the time. If I ever happen to have an intuition, this is not acted upon unselfconsciously, it is not simply subsumed into action: because object of consciousness, it is brought into the plane of attention, opaque, objectified. And SLOW! Which gets worse when I can spy my opponent sneering through his mask at that vehemence born of frustration (Yes, Matt C., that one's for you! And yes, I do pull my arm back because I want to hit you very hard. One day I will hit you very hard).
Instinct cannot be pursued: it must ensue, and it can only do so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication, as the by-product of one's surrender to a mind other than one's own. Certain goals cannot be directly pursued because direct pursuit changes them. The right parry must be a side effect of something else. O la-la, I sounded exactly like John R. there!
My ability gets broken up by my attempt to know it. Am I thinking a thought while you're actually thinking it? Can training liberate me? You guys have mental abilities which happen to be instrumentally useful, and therefore should be pursued and trained. But for me, doing so make no sense, since ability cannot be call into action by an effort of will, and the attempt to do so merely drives it further away: if I pursue reaction, it vanishes into nothing.
Could everyone give me the last thought they think just before a bout? I love statistics.
Gianna