"This art is really about understanding people. Understanding yourself, understanding others. If we all understood each other better, maybe we could avoid things like Vietnam. . . ." 
--Tim Carron, Guided Chaos Grandmaster and Vietnam War Veteran

Between what Tim told me years ago and more recent developments such as the Combative Movement Immersion Seminar, and peeling back the layers of example provided by John and his advanced students, I have reached some conclusions (for now) about GC and contact flow:

At more advanced levels, contact flow is (in part) about human connection and deepening our understanding of human behavior, motivation, thoughts and emotions, beyond mere movement. John has called it "deep listening" and "empathy." Tim sometimes called it "love." 

This means that, in order to learn, we must allow our training partners to express themselves fully, rather than stifling them or allowing our own thoughts and emotions to overpower theirs. We are not listening carefully if we're shouting at the same time. 

Likewise, just as you can't hope to understand your significant other's feelings and thoughts if you are already hostile to them, you will not be able to learn as much from your training partner if you are reactive with your own fears, judgments and corrections. Listening effectively entails suspending such knee-jerk reactions in order to fully understand what you're hearing/feeling. This can even apply to solo practice: are you really listening to yourself, or shouting yourself down by "trying" to do things "right"?

John has mentioned that more intuitive people tend to get the hang of GC faster than others. It can be even more challenging to those of us who, had we been growing up today, might have been classified somewhere on the less severe end of the autism spectrum in terms of our difficulty understanding other people and their inner lives. The good news is, it seems to cut both ways. While having less natural intuition might make learning GC initially more challenging, perseverance in GC can help us all learn to be more intuitive, sensitive, mindful and understanding of others.

If this post is getting too peaceful for your tastes, remember that the better we understand people on a deep, subconscious level, the more easily we can manipulate them to their doom should they threaten us. The subconscious knowledge gained from meditative contact flow is what enables us to disrupt and defeat attackers with the smallest movements and efforts, thanks to our developed intuitive awareness of where they're coming from and where they must therefore go on a deep level. In particular, our ability to read intention on a subliminal level is enhanced by all the subconscious knowledge we accumulate through good contact flow, enabling us to get the jump on people and not fall victim to deception. So the deepest "love" is what enables us to most effectively kill.  

That being said, for most of us, what might be more useful in our everyday lives: the well developed ability to more effectively kill, or the well developed ability to more effectively listen, understand, and love?

Today while teaching a private lesson, I recalled something Tim once told me, and spontaneously learned something new from it.

Tim told me that his first heart attack taught him that he could not rely on strength to win.

His second heart attack taught him that he could not rely on his own energy at all to win.

(Unfortunately there was no third lesson, as Tim's third heart attack took him from us in November of 2014.)

I had always accepted as obvious the first lesson of not relying on brute strength.

The possible meanings of the second lesson, however, had evidently eluded me.

I recalled Tim's explanation of his experience of taking beta blockers to protect his heart. He explained that normally, if you change from walking on a flat surface to even just a five-degree incline, your heartbeat adjusts slightly to keep enough oxygenated blood pumping to the cells of your body to support the needed effort at the given moment. In his case, however, the beta blockers stopped his heartbeat from adjusting in that way, keeping it at a base level to prevent any additional stress on the heart. The effect was that any physical endeavor that required any additional effort beyond baseline would promptly exhaust him, as his body was trying to put forth the effort without the additional oxygenation that it required.

My new (spontaneously sprung from the subconscious while teaching) interpretation of this:

Tim realized that he could not count on any additional energy from his own body beyond the barest minimum needed to stand and slowly walk on level ground. Therefore, he needed to depend on the other guy's energy and impetus to get his own skeleton moving to prevail.

I played with this idea briefly while working with my student . . . and quickly realized that it was pretty damn powerful! By keeping my skeleton balanced and the joints free, I was able to use any impetus from my student to propel my skeleton where it needed to go, with little or no perceived added effort or energy on my part. In fact, my student found the experience far harder to deal with than my "normal" movement, as it was nearly impossible to read (because my body was putting out virtually no signal of effort or energy) and my bones arrived with significant authority, by necessity unhindered by movement-stifling tension in order to allow his smallest input to drive my entire skeleton. (This is clearly, by the way, related to the idea of "feathers in your body but bowling balls in the bottoms of your shoes," or John's recent turn of phrase, "Float like a butterfly, root like a tree!") 

My body even spontaneously replicated a couple peculiarities of Tim's movement, such as his tendency to strike the arms of the opponent when driven to by the opponent's movement. This is something I had almost never done spontaneously before--and yet now, newly inspired by one Tim's past lessons, there is was.

All of this happened towards the end of the scheduled lesson, so I didn't have much time to experiment with it. Much more to do!

In the erudite words of many Guided Chaos students through the years: "Damn, this shit is so cool. . . ."