Every time we are facing the unknown a flood of information is coming our way.
There are times when you need to search in the dark. You can’t turn your light on. You would make yourself a target. You might do a dynamic entry but in a big or complex environment, with an immediate threat, and only one or two entering, maybe not. You might turn on the interior lights, but you have uncontrolled areas, darkness, shadows, corners and doorways, while you remain in the light. You enter silently. Wait and listen.
Whatever the tactical choice, I have never heard any professional, military or law enforcement, SWAT or spec ops, say that they can locate people by vibe, intuition, or a sixth sense alone. They rely on tools and techniques as well as their minds and training.
A myth has grown up around this ability in martial arts.
Following up on the Opponent’s Intent in the Seven Samurai article, here is a way to do it – not as fantasy or magic from another world, but as practical combative skill training.
In the scenario examined in that article the highest skill was to perceive the threat and resolve it before it could materialize. To pre-empt the attack by eliminating the conditions under which it could manifest.
The intermediate skill level was to perceive the opponent’s intention before he could act on it. The third level, not as refined as the others but still skillful, was to perceive and respond decisively to stop an attack as it is launched.
When Kurosawa made the Seven Samurai, during the recovery following the Second World War, the nostalgia for the lost world of the samurai was strong. It was a memory of a time after another cataclysm, the Battle of Sekigahara, when virtues and values rose through the ashes, giving people hope and a path. A similar nostalgia fueled the story of the Last Samurai and the events of the samurai rebellion opposed to the modernization of Japan following the Meiji Restoration.
A similar nostalgia is evident in the American western genre, which romanticized a time that was wild and dangerous, that valorized the lives of men who broke the constraints of convention and conformity, gave up comfort and safety, and faced the world with courage.
The deep training of body and mind presented in the Seven Samurai was on the wane for some time, and was deleted from popular budo around the turn of the 20th century, as technology began to supplant skill mastery as the driver of military might. The same trade-off that led to the decline in empty hand skill, a trend now being reversed, described in Lost Bunkai and the Karate Revolution.
Blindfolded training is one approach some use to develop their intuition.
Being blindfolded or closing your eyes while doing kata is good for balance, and for assuring that turns, stances and ranges of motion are internalized, not reliant on room orientation. Good training, but not training in intuition.
Closing your eyes during continuous contact flow drills, like push hands, can be good. It heightens reliance on proprioception, which in sustained contact yields a faster and more complete response than visual perception.
For practical combative training that is a preliminary step, because we want to be able to use proprioception naturally as needed during contact and switch back to vision when contact is broken – as it will be in any combative scenario, including grappling.
Closing your eyes or doing blindfolded sparring is also used as a drill by some groups. I have not seen this used effectively as a perception-enhancing exercise. One of the intended purposes is to heighten reliance on sound. It can be used to make people panic and get aggressive, and to accustom them to getting hit. The benefits of that are not obvious.
I have not seen or heard of anyone who has effectively trained to perceive the invisible by fighting blind. But there is a kind of perception that can anticipate the intentions, actions, and gaps in the defense of an opponent before they become manifest. It isn’t supernatural, precognition, guessing or a trick.
There are two main ways in which we can develop this.
You will encounter endless permutations from doing them in training, again and again. Like playing a lot of chess, you begin to see what is possible, not just what is there.
With many different opponents and practice partners, under increasing pressure, you explore, train, experiment, try approaches, observe habits, tactics, techniques and patterns, and after some time the potentialities inherent in any posture and any technique sequence become apparent.
Initially your attention is focused on your opponent. At the next level we enlarge our perceptual field to encompass the space we are operating in. We are still focused on the opponent, but also the context. Like listening to a soloist in a band, you are focused on the solo but remain aware of the rest of the music, the context of the solo. That context gives you more information about the meaning of the solo and what to expect.
In a combative environment this opens a new dimension of perception and response. In a musical ensemble the result of this deepened awareness is union with the sound and the performers. In combatives the outcome of this shift is union with the body, mind and methods of the opponent.
We train this by increasing the sensitivity and scope of awareness beyond a single object by training a calm clear strong stable mind. We get used to filling the space with our mind. In this space, in this frame of mind, the mind is still, but things move within it. We maintain that frame of reference while dealing with the task at hand – whether that is a search in the dark or an engagement with an opponent.
A conventional, untrained mind moves in tandem with changing conditions, is moved by them, and responds to them. Our mind moves with our intention, the opponent’s actions, our responses, plans, desires, memories, fear, features of the environment, and so on. That all happens faster than we can observe, but it is happening. Events may exceed our ability to keep up. It inhibits our freedom of action.
By cultivating stable, clear, global mental awareness we get the freedom to act beyond conventional skill training. This takes persistent effort over time.
Experiencing the whole environment, not artificially fragmenting it with selective perception – visual or conceptual – seems to be what Musashi Miyamoto is referring to with his distinction between “observing eyes” and “perceiving eyes”, in the Book of Five Rings.
It may be the “elephant’s gaze” of the Buddha – the way the Buddha would turn his whole body to the direction he wanted to look, instead of just turning his head, or moving his eyes. This is understood to show that his body and mind are one, that his attention and his purpose are undivided.
This mirrors the way we train to search a building, face an opponent, or live a life.
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Post copyright © 2025 Jeffrey Brooks, MountainKarateNC.com, Yamabayashi Ryu, Mountain Karate Dojo, in the mountains of western NC.
Photo by Christian Lue via Unsplash
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read True Karate Dō by Jeffrey Brooks
“One of the best books I’ve read in years, inviting and compelling. Jeff Brooks moves effortlessly from martial arts to Buddhism to consciousness studies, self-transformation, and related fields in this wide-ranging and Illuminating study that has much to offer both novice explorers and veteran practitioners. A splendid achievement.”— Philip Zaleski, Editor, The Best Spiritual Writing series