Reflecting Day: Dominick Giacobbe The Mind Master

Two black eyes stare at you from the book. "MASTER YOUR MIND by Dominick A. Giacobbe," the book says. You wonder what it could possibly mean by that. "Mind Master Dominick Giacobbe Reveals the Secrets of Mind Power," the book says. Okay, you get it now.

Obviously, MASTER YOUR MIND (2011) is an instruction manual on unlocking your mind's full potential as understood by Black Belt Magazine hall-of-famer, Dominick Giacobbe. It's amazing, and I already finished describing it. Take that first sentence and reword it for 128 pages. I am risking death punch to tell you this, but Master Dominick Giacobbe did not have a book's worth of things to say about brains.

Mind Master Dominick Giacobbe has no way of knowing your existing knowledge of brains, so he starts with the basics. Brains are the wet shell around the mind, which Merriam-Webster defines as the dry part of the head, found on the crest of your body where karate is stored. There's got to be a better way to put that.

Exactly. The body is like a car for your brain. There's got to be a same exact way to put that.

Perfect. Think of your body like a car for your brain. There's got to be another identical way to put that

Precisely. We are all meat cars being driven by minds, which is basically the same thing as a brain.

Okay, the brain and the mind are different, but they're each driving, and one is inside the other, so picture a van with two steering wheels where anything goes. Speaking of fucking vans, Master Dominick Giacobbe is terrible at mind analogies, but he is fucking awesome at mind vans.

Not pictured: Stephen Hawking, the second place winner of this test of mental strength. Sorry, ignore that. I don't want to spoil the perfect comedy of this situation we find ourselves in with cheap jokes. We are reading a brain book by a man who described brains as car drivers, car drivers, or car drivers before showing us what real mental strength looks like: towing a karate van with your teeth. For anyone who enjoys stupid shit, MASTER YOUR MIND by Dominick A. Giacobbe is a dream come true.

We can skip this part about understanding the brain if you remember the lesson from earlier about it being a car driver. Books are mostly pointless anyway, since mental strength is measured by how far you can drive a masonry nail into a brick with your boner. It's where we get the adage "bleeding penis smart" like in the phrase, "Please meet my dentist wife, Dr. Reyes-Tonsils, Bleeding Penis Smart, DDS." Where were we? Oh, right. Master Giacobbe was explaining brains.

It might be because the author has a van in his mouth, but I want to be generous and call this simplicity "zen-like." Not all knowledge has to be "new" or "useful" or "above a second grade level." Sometimes it's okay to tell van biters that brain is drive leg wheels, where big body mean large brain.

And sometimes it's okay to say exercise helps blood good for make brain unhungry.

And sometimes it's okay to say that again. Blood good for the brain tummy is always worth a second mention.

Minds are simple. Healthy blood carries nutrition to feed the brain which is like a driver who is a type of commander whose teeth are there for you when your van runs out of gas. Let's try this another way.

In most ways your brain is a bus driver and a nerve commander, but ultimately the mind is best thought of as a Tiger who really believes in himself. It's where we get the adage "confidence of a tiger, blood of a van" like in the phrase, "You cannot compel me to testify against my wife, Dr. Reyes-Tonsils, Bleeding Penis Smart, DDS whose van allegedly drove into a tiger enclosure." What was I talking about? Oh, right. Mastering your mind.

Now that you're familiar with brains, where to find them, and how to care for them, let's talk about what you can do once you master one. In any other book like this, it would be getting a promotion or number closing on a nine you day-gamed at the abortion clinic. That's not what Master Dominick Giacobbe is offering. These beginner brain facts he's repeating will stop your open wounds from bleeding. Like ancient warriors! We're talking pre-doctor, pre-bandage ancient, where the only treatment for getting stabbed was death or sorcery. It's so much more than any reader could have expected, and it's not hypothetical or metaphorical. He puts goddamn motorcycle spokes through his arms and hangs water buckets from them. It's so incredibly weird. It's like someone said to him, "Is that all a karate trance can do? Help you pull a van with your teeth?" and Grand Master Giacobbe just completely fucking panicked and said, "N-no! See these knitting needles? And these… these water buckets!?"

"Use these mental secrets to get ahead in business," your pussy meditation book says. "I barely know what a brain is and I'll let you hang me from meat hooks," Master Dominick Giacobbe's book says.

This is the correct answer to the question, "What's, by far, the best way to explain thought?"

And this is the correct answer to the question, "This plastic bag claims it's not a toy; what is it hiding?"

I don't have a background in pathology, so I can't verify Grand Master Dominick Giacobbe's findings here. However, I do know enough about medicine to know "asthma, wait no hundreds, wait, no all" is the correct answer to the question, "In a time when Google still worked, name five diseases you can cure with air."

I'm not sure why Master Giacobbe wants our brain to be pompous. He probably meant something else. I don't care. In fact, I'd probably hate it if he was a Tang Soo Do wizard and smart. The important thing to know is that increasing your brain's pomposity will help with sports, or even important activities like carrying water buckets with our elbow skin. Let's see what that looks like again:

Master Giacobbe mentions this appearance on the Guinness World Records TV show seven (7) times in his book, which seems reasonable. I dare anyone to say anything about themselves more interesting than "I have the world record for elbow skin water bucket without dying (karate trance division)." Speaking of interesting, Master Giacobbe has three fascinating thoughts on the power of positive thinking.

Now that I'm counting them again, Master Giacobbe has a fascinating thought on the power of positive thinking. And fascinating might be a strong word. But you can't argue with the results. Here's merely one of the ways he's translated his mind powers into otherworldly abilities:

It may sound too fantastical to believe, but through intense concentration, Master Giacobbe can use motorcycle spokes to carry water buckets with his elbow skin. He can pierce his arms using only mental strength and motorcycle spokes. At any moment, he is only several mind powers away from arm become wet motorbike, hi, I'm Karate.

In martial arts, memory is an important part of any brain, which is the key to unlocking powers and the importance of memory, which you need to unlock powers. Here's one now:

Through devotion to mind master training, you can add one more ability to your martial arsenal: piercing your arms with motorcycle spokes and hanging water buckets from your elbows. Imagine making fewer trips when you're dismantling motorcycles and carrying buckets. Well, imagine no longer. You are only decades of intense, focused mental discipline away.

All this talk of memory reminds me of one of the mind master abilities I forgot to mention:

Once you get good enough at Mind Power, you can jab motorcycle spokes through your arms and hang buckets of water from your elbows!

This old myth about humans not using their full brains isn't really true, but Mind Master Grand Master Giacobbe wrote this in 2011, three years before the Scarlet Johansson film Lucy made it illegally stupid to bring up. But I could be wrong. After all, you can't argue with someone who has unlocked the ability to… hold on, let me find another one of his cool powers of the Orient…

… pierce his elbows with motorcycle spokes and hang buckets of water from them!

Brain expert Dominick Giacobbe isn't only an expert on human brains, but animal brains, all of whom use more brain than we do (citation below*). It's how they've managed to unlock posthuman abilities such as dig, or tail. Yet with years, maybe decades, of careful breathing and brain thinking, humans can unlock the powers as these much smarter animals. Powers! Such! As!

. . .

Okay, I know I've been doing a bit about how the only move in this style of karate is bleeding less during an elbow piercing, but Master Giacobbe can do more than hang water buckets from motorcycle spokes in his arms. I'm not going to put up another picture of him hanging water buckets from motorcycle spokes in his arms. This is a completely different and remarkable ability:

He can hang a human boy from the motorcycle spokes in his arms!

MASTER YOUR MIND is as close to perfect as a book can get. It's a man who has spent his life putting himself into karate trances to do one very, very, very specific magic trick and when he decided to write a book on how to do it, it turns out he had no idea. Not even the start of a thought. Breathing, probably? Definitely something about the brain, and now you can too? He seems good at whatever this bucket thing is, but it didn't translate well into a philosophy. MASTER YOUR MIND is only #11,194 in Amazon's Meditation category, and didn't crack the top ten of books called Master Your Mind. I'm not being a dick. I mean, I am, but there really are thirteen (13) books called Master Your Mind that come up first when you search for it. And this is not the first time Master Dominick Giacobbe created an insane adaptation of his elbow piercing meditation for the consumer market. We're not done, because like any time someone enters my home, I have found an excuse to show you Karatecise Workout by Master Dominick Giacobbe.

This tape might be the closest thing I have to an origin story. My grandfather owned a merchandising publication, basically a magazine that was only ads, so he got sent crates of aggressively random things like books, knives, and VHS screeners. Three copies of this got mailed to him in 1987.

I've had this exact Karatecise tape since childhood. I wrote my name on it because my brother and sister got the other two copies, making us America's first and only three Karatecise household. I have no idea how many of these got sold, but it's not on eBay or Amazon, my brother and sister definitely didn't keep theirs, and if you ask Google about Karatecise Workout, it says, "did you mean Kieran Culkin webbed feet, use TickleAI to empower Kirb_y Colkor webfeEt". The point is, I might own the only existing copy.

I was ten years old when I first watched Karatecise, and before that it hadn't occured to me something could be karate, but also fucking insane. Here was a workout video that started with a man claiming he, if you gave him a minute to concentrate, was immune to all pain and bleeding. And then he played footage of his students bashing boards and ice in half with their faces. It was exactly what I already knew karate to be, but something about it went too far. Dark secrets of the world were laid bare. Karate is fake, people have no idea what they're doing at any level of success, and sometimes there is no distinction between awesome and stupid.

This is one of the times where there's no stupid in the awesome. Hyah, karate!

I didn't know what I was doing at age ten. No one does. I'd come home from church to find an Ewok movie on the TV and say, "Hell yeah, a second made-for-TV Ewok movie! The perfect thing after those believable tales of the One True God!" I trusted in the world, in the competence of man. And then I saw Master Giacobbe kick this baby boy.

This black belt of Tang Soo Do, some exotic, mystical version of karate with real super powers, could have cut anything in or out of this. It's his video! And he chose to show a clip of him just stomping this little 18 inch fucker in half. Until I put this in the family VCR, I had never questioned karate magic. I would have assumed any black belt could levitate at least a little bit, but something about a mind master showing only one fight highlight and it being this made me question things. Has he made other insane decisions? Should I question the judgment of the all black belts? Like the gas station attendant who taught me sai techniques at the YMCA, a real story of my childhood without any details changed?

Another thing I noticed was this workout video was not a workout video. It was 1987, so statistically, 40% of any VHS tape was workout video, but this was mostly skits and karate demonstrations filmed at a hotel conference center. Why? To what end? Marketing? Karate awareness? At one point the host throws away his microphone as if to say, "Enough of this chop-socky shit. Which of you hungover podiatrists wants to watch me bang this piano broad?" And though a child has no expectations, I somehow knew a fitness video shouldn't include five minutes of a man getting his penis destroyed by a karate performer going way too hard.

They do a Big Bad Wolf version of the exact same skit. "I shouldn't be seeing this, no one should," I was certain.

The next twenty minutes of the workout is footage of Dominick Giacobbe and his friends on a boardwalk performing fakir street magic, but in a country where the public schools teach physics. They made a big deal about how they were entering mind master trances (the kind ancient warriors used instead of bandages!) and then stood on swords or laid under motorcycle ramps the way Snow Job might explain the basic concept of pressure to teens trapped under an avalanche. This video was absolutely the coolest way I could have found out there was never any magic and everyone was lying, all the time.

You already know what they closed the show with. Only the best, most useful application of karate trance there will ever be, a feat Dom Giacobbe would go on to never adapt, improve, or move to a part of his body with less scar tissue over the course of 24 years.

Alright, karate expertise has been proven with street magic! Time to work out! But first, let's learn exactly two self defense moves. Number one is a strangle escape, which is pretty fun. You throw an uppercut at nothing, catch it on the other side of the choke, twist to get away, and then twist to get revenge. I'm not saying it would never work, but I am saying it's a cute way to let your murderer know things are going to go smoothly from here.

Next up, and last, is an advanced wrist leaving. Snap open your hand to paralyze, stun, bewilder, and immobilize your grabber. Then you kind of leave, mostly. I'm making it sound too elaborate. To me, this moment was as shocking as finding out Darth Vader was Luke's father. I spent my days inventing new kicks and weapons, each deadlier than the last, so it was a mind-blowing twist to discover karate could suck. "This is how Phil Collins tells his dry cleaner he missed forty semen stains on his penis milking jacket," I somehow instantly knew.

Karatecise Workout does eventually get to some workouts. It's a few rounds of toe touches, a quick set of snap kicks, and a brief section for LEGS (quads, hamstrings, and calves). I knew you wouldn't believe me if I said it was thirty seconds of them hopping up and down, so I captured the entirety of the LEGS (quads, hamstrings, and calves) workout here:

It was gorgeous. Four masters of psychic motorcycle karate bouncing nowhere close to the center of the frame in a silent studio. It was aspirational. Before this, I'd never known what it was to love something with all my heart yet also know it was the work of idiot madmen. In that same spirit, I am both completely sincere and totally fucking around when I say I owe my career to Grand Master Mind Master Dominick Giacobbe and his deranged thoughts on brains, karate, and fitness.

*(the citation was a karate trap, nerd. Axe kick.)

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Brandon Garlock, who does that same motorcycle spoke trick thing but with two slices of pizza and his mouth over the bathroom sink at 3 AM.

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