Indigenous Ability

  Likely we are all familiar with the following Bruce Lee quote…  " Research your own experience; absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is essentially your own." It is a foundational bit of wisdom found in Mr. Lee’s posthumously published collection of combat notes titled Tao of Jeet Kune Do . It is a more straightforward transliteration of teachings phrased more ambiguously in the Tao Te Ching , attributed to Lao zi. For my taste, I prefer Mr. Lee’s iteration to the Tao Te Ching . The JKD teaching is straight forward and allows for no wiggle room for interpretation. But… What if I were to tell you that more than a few Indigenous warrior tribes of the American frontier embraced that bit of JKD pragmatics centuries before the publication of that volume in 1975? There are more than a few Warrior teachings that echo this hard-edged no-fealty to dogma, disdain for tradition, worship only at the altar of efficiency and effectiveness. I have ...

  FIRST- Me and the Missus will be travellin’ the Old Southwest Desert & Hi-Rock Sinagua Canyon Country for a combination Adventure/Research Trip the 17th thru the 26th. You can still query and place orders during that time, I simply counsel patience that I will get to these asap upon my return. Research-wise, allow me to say I have two heapin’ boxes of dusty archival materials awaiting me upon my arrival. Treasures abound!] SECOND —A li’l preview of where The Black Box Rough ‘n’ Tumble Subscription Program is headed in 2026. FUEL FOR MEN OF STANDING • Last year’s focus for The Black Box Subscription service was Unleaded Conditioning to get the Combat Athlete, the Old School Combination Man into the best conditioning of his life, even in Old Dogs like myself. • And, yes, the entire 6-Block Program is now available in the store for those ready to GO! https://www.extremeselfprotection.com/store • This year The Black Box Brotherhood focus will be FRONTIER JKD. • We wil...

 

  [First, Mr. Thoreau, on resolve and every act a work of art or of defacement.] “ Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the God he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them .”—Thoreau ·         Every act, every choice is but another strike of the chisel on the marble of our Lives. ·         No hammering—nothing is revealed. ·         Unaesthetic hammering, a substandard work is revealed. ·         Be it our bodies, our characters, our interactions with all—we are the Artists. ·         May we all have the Eyes and Determination of the Old Masters! ...

  THE MESCALERO MOUNTAIN TEACHING “Climb the Mountain. If it is rocky, climb the Mountain. If it is hard, climb the Mountain. If it wakes fright, climb the Mountain. The Mountain is the Way.” Indigenous Tribes of the Americas are full of such youthful “hardship” training. Practices designed specifically to build physical and mental fortitude, dare I say, forge a Warrior Spirit. We find this echoed perfectly in practices 300 centuries ago in Ancient Greece. THE HERCULES ROAD “ Prodicus, who, besides his discoveries in grammar, is the author of a popular and edifying fable which has served in many schoolrooms for many centuries. It tells how Heracles once came to some cross roads, one road open, broad, and smooth and leading a little downhill, the other narrow and uphill and rough: and on the first you gradually became a worse and worse man, on the second a better one.”— Gilbert Murray, The Five Stages of Greek Religion [1925]   To Forge Yourself into a Greek Warr...