The student who would be a master of him or herself, as-well-as their martial art, can look to progress through the following roughly defined levels.
Initiate level – Students new to the art are laden with their own ‘natural’ ways of movement, personality quirks, and methods of responding to stress and conflict.
At this stage, the student will be experimenting with the strategies and new ways of moving their bodies to carry out the performance of the techniques.
Generally, new students come with a widely varied set of motivations, desires, needs and expectations from what they want to get out of their martial arts training.
Many have aspirations of becoming masters at this point, some only want to learn a few neat tricks in the shortest time possible, and still others have delusions-of-grandeur of ‘being’ THE master after just a few classes or belt promotions! Generally though, students new to the art strive to learn their techniques and see their teacher as the focal point of what they want to be like on a physical level.
Intermediate level – These students have made the dual commitment to themselves; to * 1) learn the art at least to the point of their own personally-set goal, which is usually a belt level, and… * 2) to their teacher; that they will do the study and practice necessary to meet the standards expected by the teacher.
Intermediate students begin to understand the ‘essence’ of the techniques and begin relating them to each specific attack and attacker.
The questions sought often begin to take on a philosophical nature as the student begins to understand karma – to see his or her own role in setting up the conflicts and problems in their own life.
The concept of “Master” begins to deepen and broaden as the student sees that mastery is more than the mere ‘performance’ of kata – preset technique models.
This same ‘teenage’ rebellion or “Know-it-all” attitude can warp the student’s judgment and perception of where they are on the Path and, if not carefully guarded against, can cause the student to resent his or her teacher’s standards as “Holding them back.” Often this attitude will cause the less experienced practitioner to resort to the unscrupulous act of self-promoting themselves to black belt in order to live out the fantasy.
Advanced level – At the advanced level, the student’s ability with the techniques is increasing to ever-more subtle levels where less and less work is needed to generate results.
The student is concentrating more on what causes a fight and the increased sensitivity needed to recognize the prompters and cues that are present to signal a possibly hostile situation.
These students extend their awareness of their teacher to his or her life-habits and ability to deal with nonphysical problems and opportunities.
Here, the roles are reversed to the point where the students are critiquing the teacher to see if he or she truly does “Walk-the-walk” that they have been preaching.
It is usually at this level where lesser teachers are spotted and exposed by intuitive students, and the veil-of-illusion and delusion is seen through.
The maturing student realizes that there are only so many techniques and ways of doing something with and to the human body.
At this level though, the advanced student is already seen as a role model by the lower students and so strives, as a means of self-improvement, to develop ways of explaining and teaching the art to others.
Mastery level – The masters, still seeing themselves as students, continue to climb the ladders of progress.
The master is still a student though, as hard as it may be to tell from a lower perspective.
Mastery and its attainment relies on the student’s own self-motivated drive to be all that they possibly can be.
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