A Course in Miracles, Content w/ Context and Play
The opening line of A Course in Miracles reads:
“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”
At first or 45th read, this may make no sense to you. It is my goal to help with that and relate it to niche coaches coming to grips and retaliating on the Internet because we’re going to take their jobs sooner rather than later. Because Power wins in the end.
But man, it’s taken a while.
Okay, the quote. Nothing real can be threatened. Play is innate. Given to us by God. Like we explored earlier this month, kittens with no mother to show them, know how to play. Like Lady Gaga, they were born this way.
Play is an infinite game. Lacrosse is called the Creator’s Game and the Natives truly believe it was given to them by God. It showed up without asking, it continues even though we are trying to kill it,
and it will make a comeback greater than any movement we’ve seen to date in the future. Because play is real. And nothing real can be threatened.
Next part… Nothing unreal exists.
This is my favorite part. A student of Power vs. Force and applied Kinesiology knows that anything under 200 doesn’t register to the testing arm.
Shame is unreal. Guilt is unreal. Pride is unreal. Anger is unreal. And parted-out decontextualized training is… Unreal.
Power is holistic.
Force is analytic.
Power is content with context.
Force is content without context.
Here’s a story…
Content without context, the rate limiters you see are fugazzi. Some people can’t skate well when everything is made conscious…
but they evade checks, skate well laterally to avoid stick checks, and make plays 1v1 in tight spaces when they aren’t thinking in the game. Some people don’t skate well in line-skating edgework down the ice but can create separation while being chased at full speed in a tag game or real game like nobody’s business. And have way better in-context edge control/strength.
And it’s hard to see self-organization abilities (or inabilities) going half speed using half the shin angle you would at full speed in a cut on a defender because you don’t care about dangling a PEP… or when you’re 100% mentally and emotionally checked out from whatever Columbus was doing. It’s not the same movement. It’s not the same intention.
Content without context concerns itself with ‘movement’.
Content with context concerns itself with ‘movement solutions’.
Here are 3 quotes from Shawn Myszka’s newest collection of books to stir on:
Therefore, it’s not worth extracting insight from content without context.
Content without context is observing an illusion and trying to build a player development plan around it. Why waste time and energy?
Expose limitations in context. Observe their self-organization when the ‘skating’, ‘puckhandling’, etc are unconscious in game-like situations.
Otherwise you might be studying the player for a test that doesn’t exist in reality.
Because, content without context is not real.
One more story…
Remember College?
We used to do these static, sterile mobility tests in Kinesiology classes in college before that sector of the universe took a quantum leap in understanding.
Shin angle: X degrees; this is what he’s capable of. It was black and white.
Then they’d watch a game, take a screenshot because something looked ‘different’ and measure... Greater than X degrees. Heads would roll. Turns out you can get into positions unconsciously in the moment that you don’t own consciously in the lab.
Go ahead, make a coaching observation out of context. Measure something out of context; you’ll be comparing apples to fucking spaceships.
If you laughed at that, you’re above 200. Humor is above 500. Real.
