Yoda in Empire Strikes Back chides young Luke Skywalker with the comment, “Do or do not — there is no try.” The notion is not to think about doing something, or attempt to do something, so much as to just do it. Wing Chun (and, as it turns out, most of life) works this way. You don’t try to do something. You just do it.

Chi sao is a big part of Wing Chun training. Almost like a very light contact sparring, this two person drill basically has both people try to find openings in the other’s guard. Over time, this develops what are call “contact reflexes”, or the ability to respond without thinking. In actual sparring or fighting, it’s much the same: Just do it. Don’t think about it.

This article on the conscious and unconscious self describes what may be happening. What the article describes is the notion that the “you” is not actually “yourself”. We have a conscious layer on top of much that is automated. Consciousness, in the realm of mind evolution, is a relatively recent development. This should be treated less as an identity, and more as the ability to recognize what’s going on, to shape the input appropriately. Think of your morning commute. Some days, you put the key in the door, and before you realize it, you’re taking the key out of the ignition, with no idea of what transpired in between. It’s automatic. You don’t realize it, but in hundreds of ways each day, you let this automation take place. It’s impossible to keep track of everything at once. A separate article on unconscious operation by the same author demonstrates the “spooky” way in which he was able to find a book he wanted on a bookshelf. There’s a lot of power to this concept.

Wing Chun can be said to be doing the same thing. In a fight, you can’t think of the right block for each incoming strike. It takes too long. You have to develop the right reactions. This usually only comes about through a lot of practice. Is it the conscious self that is being trained here? Not at all. It’s the subconscious self, and through enough training, the reactions can be well developed, and you can learn to trust what skills you have developed. Rather than thinking of the right block for an attack, you just block the attack. You don’t think about it, you just do.

However, as Malcom Gladwell noted in Blink, a book about how our mind makes snap judgments, sometimes our subconscious makes the wrong choices. Consider the Implicit Association Test, specifically, for race. We typically have a pre-wired configuration to associate “black” with “bad”. Almost all people take the test, and find that they have an association for “black” and “bad”, with a countering association for “white” and “good”. It’s wired into our subconscious. You can take the test again and again, and get the same results. In this sense, our unconscious selves pick up queues from our environment, and translates that into this sort of association. This doesn’t mean we’re racist, because our conscious selves don’t make such associations. Interestingly enough, you can circumvent this phenomenon, by seeding your subconscious with different input. If, before the test, you had been exposed to a lot of things that associate “black” with “good”, you’d find that the test results would be quite different. Gladwell cited a case where a person took the test every day, just to fill it with data, always getting the same result. However, one day, he took the test, and got a different result. What did he do differently? He was watching black athletes compete in the Olympics that morning, thus seeding his unconscious with different input. He changed his unconscious associations, without realizing it.

When training Wing Chun, what I’m doing is helping to train the automatic portion of myself to respond appropriately. I consciously drill on the correct movements, so the subconscious portion of myself can act effectively. This is what makes training so strange: you can’t tell someone in a straightforward manner how to do the right moves. You have to feed in the right input, so that your subconscious can internalize it properly.

It’s hard to truly understand this. A lot of people think they understand this, but have trouble actually putting it into action. I am one of these people. I understand the principles, but have trouble with the practice. Hopefully, I’ll get better at programming my subconscious correctly. As I get better, I will fully realize the phrase, do or do not. There is no try.