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In his book Street Ninja, Dirk Skinner says that the more you know about how the human body is put together, the easier it is to take it apart.

The same holds true for the human mind.

The more we understand about the basic functioning of the human brain—how it “sees” the world around it, how it processes and stores information—the easier it is for us to guard the frontiers of our own minds while successfully mounting a campaign against the minds of our enemies.

HOW THE BRAIN SEES

The brain sees and then stores information, even the most complex of information, as simple picture-symbols. This holds true whether the brain is taking in information only through the eyes or through one of the other senses—hearing, smell, taste, or touch.

Try this experiment: Ask people to describe a spiral staircase. After searching for words to describe the staircase, observe how they inevitably draw pictures (symbols) of it in the air with their hands.

Now ask someone, “How many sides does a pyramid have?” Most people will say “three,” correcting themselves only after you point out that a triangle has three sides, a three-dimensional pyramid, five. When you say “pyramid,” your friend’s brain hears “triangle” since the brain stores the memory of a pyramid (complex) behind the picture-symbol of a triangle (simple) in the “things that remind me of a triangle” file.

Consider this: “The United States of America” is a vast and complex notion. The concept of “U.S.A.” incorporates such subconcepts as “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness.”

However, as complex as the actual physical entity of the U.S.A. is, all it takes is seeing a flag with stars and stripes, a scowling poster of Uncle Sam, or hearing a patriotic song on the radio for our brains to visualize the U.S.A. in all its glory.

Mind-masters, from Army recruiters to political spin-doctors, know the value of symbols that cause our minds to involuntarily form thoughts and images, symbols that trigger responses within us whether we want our minds to or not!

The Power of Visualization

Recent research conducted at Stanford University has verified what master mind manipulators have known for centuries: that mentally picturing doing an action in our minds causes our nervous system to react as if we were actually doing the action being imagined.

World-class athletes know the positive potential of such deliberate voluntary mental visualization training. In fact, an estimated 90 percent of sports figures practice some form of visualization. Shadow boxing employs visualization, as do ritual forms (kata) of martial arts.

On the more sinister side, unscrupulous mind-slayers know that involuntary visualization (e.g. reliving a catastrophic failure or traumatic assault over and over in the mind) serves only to perpetuate feelings of powerlessness and self-loathing.

Mind-slayers also know that simple words or even gestures can be used to purposely trigger involuntary images in another’s mind. If you doubt this, flip a stranger “the bird” and see how quickly your single raised middle finger affects that stranger’s mood. Why? Not because the digit itself is threatening, but because of the images the person forms in his mind when seeing that single finger.

Visualization works because, contrary to popular conception, our eyes are not cameras perfectly recording all the things that cross in front of our eyes. For example, when we look at an object, say a tree, we are not actually seeing the tree perfectly reflected off some mirror in our brain. What we are seeing in our mind’s eye is our brain’s reassembled image of that tree.

Like Star Trek’s matter-transporter, our eyes “disassemble” the tree into manageable data-bytes (with information relating to the object’s shape, size, color, etc.) and then “beam” (relay) that information in the form of electrical impulses into our brain, where an image of the tree is then reassembled.

Between breaking down the image into storable data bytes and reassembling those data bytes inside our heads, dozens of different filters affect how accurately we reassemble those data bytes.

These filters include:

• Physical defects in the structure of sense organs (such as colorblindness, poor hearing, or lack of taste buds);

• Defects in the brain itself (chemical imbalances, either natural or self-induced);

• Strong emotion and psychological concerns (e.g. fear, lust, or jealousy);

• Socially-imposed constraints and taboos (e.g. religious or racial prejudices).

These filters affect how accurately an object (or an idea, for that matter) is reassembled inside our heads.

Killer Symbols

What teenager hasn’t experienced an embarrassing wet dream? How is it that nightmares make our hearts beat faster? Why does merely thinking about asking the prom queen out on a date, asking the boss for a raise, or having to prepare for an important speech make us literally break out in a cold sweat?

It is because images from our internal world, our mind, can affect us externally by making us physically ill or ill at ease.

It is no secret that mental symbols can cause physical symptoms. For example, racist symbols may excite us, frighten us, or piss us off, causing us to tremble with rage. Likewise, patriotic symbols and team emblems stir our blood, causing our chests to swell with pride. In other words, a mental image or symbol can easily have physical consequence as significant as an actual physical experience.

Some experts maintain that mental images and symbols can affect our health because they communicate at a cellular level, directly influencing physical tissues and organs. This is one explanation for the documented power of voodoo-type curses to kill.

Medicine has documented the “placebo effect,” in which patients given sugar pills they believe to be powerful narcotics relieve their own pain through the power of suggestion. Less well known is the “nocebo effect,” in which patients, believing themselves to have terminal illnesses (or to be under curses) literally make themselves sick and die. In these instances, the patient’s belief sets off a chain of mental images that culminate in the person physically making himself sick, perhaps even dying from fright.

Types of Symbols

“. . . the mind of man contains only so many visions.”

—Judith Hooper and Dick Teresi,

The Three-Pound Universe

How we respond to visualized symbols depends on the background and context in which the symbols appear and on the conditions under which we originally encountered their meaning.

There are three types of symbols: universal symbols, cultural-religious symbols, and symbols that have purely personal meaning. Adept mind-slayers learn to recognize and wield these different kinds of symbols in order to mentally and physically affect others’ thoughts and actions.

Universal Symbols

Some symbols are universal and are found in all times, in all parts of the world. Psychology pioneer Carl Jung (1875-1961) called these universal symbols “archetypes.”

For instance, in the 1920s, University of Chicago scientist Heinrich Kluver discovered four shapes that appeared in all mescaline hallucinations: the spiral, the tunnel (or funnel), the cobweb, and latticework (criss-crossing lines or honeycomb patterns). These “geometric constants” were subsequently verified in studies at UCLA in the 1970s.¹

Such studies indicate that our brains are already hard-wired with certain universal symbols, the four discovered in these two studies, and perhaps others yet to be isolated.

Cultural-Religious Symbols

The meanings of other symbols are determined and defined by whatever particular culture or religion happens to be dominant at the time. Such symbols include religious figures and totems, tribal standards, and patriotic emblems.

Often in a culture, a particular religious or political figure will take on importance as a symbol to others, either positive or negative (e.g. Hitler, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King).

Personal Symbols

The third type of symbol is based on our individual experiences, pleasurable or traumatic.

Despite rationalizing, all of us respond to universal symbols and to cultural and political symbols. That’s why Madison Avenue and other mind manipulation adepts are so good at making us buy things we don’t need. In many instances however, personal interpretation of symbols seems able to override cultural, political, and even universal meanings of common symbols.

Take for example the near-universal depiction of the Father/Creator/ God as a stern-faced old man with long white hair and a long white beard.

Compare Michelangelo’s paintings of God with those of the Greco-Roman statues of Zeus and Jupiter, in turn, with those of Chinese “Immortals.”

Although our logical adult brains might argue for God as a genderless, disembodied spirit, if we were raised under the scrutiny of a patriarchal culture or religion, this image of a wise and stern all-powerful father figure remains the symbol our brains “recognize” as God. This image in turn is compiled from, and associated with, images in our minds of omniscient wisdom and omnipotent authority.

While this Father/God symbol is near-universal, and is culturally and religiously reinforced, any such image must still be filtered through our personal symbol dictionary. For example, one individual dreaming of a wizened white-haired and bearded figure will feel blessed and awe-inspired by the image because it would represent his cultural/religious symbol of the benevolent patriarchal God. Conversely, a second dreamer, the victim of parental child abuse, may wake up screaming in terror at the image of an oppressive and abusive father figure dominating his dream.

The Power of Believing

The most important consideration determining how a person responds to any particular symbol is the amount of mental energy (focus) that person invests into that particular symbol, that is, how strongly he believes in that symbol.

The symbol of Uncle Sam (another stern white-bearded father figure, by the way) declaring “I want you!” is enough for some impressionable young people to pack up their ol’ kit bags and head for the front. For others, the symbol of Uncle Sam does not evoke feelings of patriotism, pride, and unquestioning obedience. For these, hostile foreign nationals for example, the symbol of Uncle Sam may incite hatred and fear.

Belief is the most powerful of mental filters, determining whether information we reassemble inside our minds is reality, or merely a reflection of the way we’d like things to be.

It is both the actual and perceived power pumped into a symbol by a culture, clan, or by a traumatized individual himself that observant and opportunistic mind-slayers evoke and manipulate through use of that symbol.

Remember: It is belief that gives symbols their power. In other words, symbols are effective only when they stimulate a belief response in the subconscious.

Why do symbols work? Why are they such effective tools in the mind-slayer’s bag of tricks?

One theory behind why symbols work so well, affecting us both mentally and physically, is that symbols bypass the critical and logical conscious part of our minds and talk directly to the nonjudgmental subconscious level of our minds.

It is at this subconscious level that the most adroit of mind-slayers ply their craft.

To recap:

The brain is not a camera. What the brain sees through the five senses is an all-too-often imperfect reconstruction.

Filters placed between an object (or information) perceived by the senses and the brain’s reconstruction of that information influence and interfere with the brain’s accurate reconstruction of that information.

These filters include such things as personal beliefs, strong emotion, past trauma, and cultural and religious prejudices.

By deliberately imposing such filters between the information perceived by the senses and its reconstruction in the brain, an accomplished mind-slayer can control how another person’s mind sees.

MASTERING THE MIND (HARAGAGEI)

“Faced with a threatening challenge or confronted by overwhelming odds, the untrained body panics. It is left to the mind to realistically assess the situation and decide the proper course of action: flight or fight, resistance or surrender, life or death . . . A trained mind is an asset, a tool for survival.”

—Dirk Skinner, Street Ninja

It is often said we humans use only 10 percent of our brains.

The truth is that we only consciously use a small percentage of our mental potential and, of the 10 percent or so we do consciously use, most of us don’t use it effectively or efficiently.

Ninja students learned early on that survival and ultimate victory begin in the mind.

Medieval shinobi-ninja faced great physical and mental challenges, not the least of which was the stress of being under the constant threat of capture, torture, and death from overwhelming numbers of samurai invaders. Yet the shinobi-ninja overcame these challenges through the use of seishinshugi, literally mind over matter.

Medieval ninja students began by learning the basic traditional and technical aspects of their chosen craft in order to survive. But, in order to master their craft, the ninja student had to pass beyond mere regurgitation of lessons, beyond mere repetition of technical physical skills.

Their first step was wiping their minds clear of psychological hindrances and mind filters (doubts, phobias, unresolved trauma, and prejudices), thus unleashing the endless potential and natural flow of the unclouded mind.

Likewise, we today need to discover our own filters, those mental programming glitches that prevent us from seeing the world clearly.

For survival, we must find these potentially fatal faults and mental fissures in our minds before our enemies do.

Seishinshugi: Mind over Matter

“All things are ready, if our minds be so.”

—Shakespeare, King Henry V

Physical circumstances all too often overpower the mind. In the face of overwhelming force or impossible odds, confusion, doubts, and fear creep in and we falter. Doubt is the beginning of defeat.

Such doubts and fears amount to stains on the mirror of our minds, a mirror that should perfectly reflect the world around us but which, instead, reflects imperfectly because of these stains on its surface. Adroit mind-slayers deliberately insert confusion, doubt and fear into the minds of their foes, purposely staining the foe’s mind-mirror in order to make that foe “see” an imperfect reflection of the world.

An imperfect reflection of the world around them causes people to act on incorrect information. Calculated on incorrect intelligence, an enterprise cannot but fail.

In order to remain in a constant state of readiness to do battle, be it physical battle or a no-less-lethal mental challenge, ninja cultivated makoto, the stainless mind. Makoto is a balanced state of mind allowing us to remain calm even in the most trying of circumstance.

The development of makoto consists of the active cultivation and practice of two skills: haragei (awareness), and rinkioken (adaptability).

Awareness

Medieval ninja practiced purposeful awareness of all five known senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) as their first line of defense, as well as their first choice of offensive weapons when aggression was called for.

As children, we used all our senses to explore the world around us. As we grew older, however, our senses began to dull. For most adults, the use of the senses is not balanced—that is, we tend to favor one or more of our senses, while neglecting the others.

Unlike the average person, mind-slayers practice the full use of all five senses to the point that they notice every shift in weight; hear each slight hesitation of doubt in a person’s voice; feel that slight tremble in another when shaking hands or brushing against him. The most accomplished of these mind-slayers can literally “smell” doubt and fear in another person. Used to their fullest, in concert with one another, the five known senses become greater than the sum of their parts, merging to create a sixth, extrasensory sense of awareness.

The effect of using their five trained senses together gave the impression to indolent and uninitiated outsiders that ninja mind-slayers possessed magic powers. Like modern mind manipulators, medieval ninja did nothing to discourage this belief.

When you practice being more attuned to the subtlety and nuance of your environment, and to the subconscious clues given off by others, it will appear to others that you possess magical extrasensory abilities though, in actuality, all you are doing is using to the fullest the same five senses we all possess but all too often take for granted.

And, if human beings do possess a long dormant and denied ESP—a sixth sense—what better way to develop it than by disciplining and making full use of our first five?

Adaptability

“Develop intuitive judgement and

understanding for everything . . .

Perceive those things which cannot be seen . . .

Pay attention even to trifles.”

—Miyamoto Musashi

The ruling samurai of medieval Japan adhered to the rigid bushido code that dictated chivalry in civilian life and outlined restrictive rules when it came to personal combat between equals.

If medieval ninja had insisted on thinking and acting in the same manner as the rest of feudal Japanese society, the great ninja masters of Iga and Koga would not have survived to pass their secrets of success along to us.

The greatest of these ninja secrets of success was their rinkioken.

Ninja warriors were trained to think on their feet, to improvise rather than to adhere to a rigid game plan. Likewise, ninja sennin trained to see and think in unconventional, non-linear fashion in order to be able to enter at will a heightened state of calm awareness that allowed them to function at their peak physical and mental level. This level of awareness is known as entering the Zen-zone.

The Zen-zone is that level of functioning where stainless mental awareness (makoto) and physical awareness merge, allowing us to instantly and effortlessly adapt to rapidly shifting circumstance.

Master mind-slayers operate from this Zen-zone, remaining balanced and aware—guarding the walls of their own mind castles while constantly alert for any sign of weakness in a foe’s mind defenses.

ENDNOTE

1

Hooper, Judith and Dick Teresi. The Three-Pound Universe. New York: Macmillan, 1986.