Bits and pieces

The Hindu Rajputs resisted India’s Muslim conquerors for hundreds of years before accepting Mogul control in the 16th century. In that era of almost constant war, the Rajputs employed a legion of bards to chronicle their exploits—in songs of great horses as well as great men—tales so bloody they make the Greeks and Trojans of the Iliad look like Quakers.

Grading is a means of objectively evaluating one’s capacity and progress by one set of standards. However, I believe that such a viewpoint has no relevance to seeking the Tao. For how far and how deep one has gone are internal questions that only the practitioner can answer. I have come to believe that it is impossible to measure each person’s depth in their pursuit using a fixed standard.

Some aikido teachers talk a lot about non-violence, but fail to understand this truth. A pacifist is not really a pacifist if he is unable to make a choice between violence and non-violence. A true pacifist is able to kill or maim in the blink of an eye, but at the moment of impending destruction of the enemy he chooses non-violence. He chooses peace. He must be able to make a choice.

Some practitioners of modern martial arts deride kata training, claiming that an adherence to form is inherently weak. They claim that one trains stereotyped responses by rote and repetition, thereby rendering oneself unable to respond with freedom to an unpredictable, random attack. On the other hand, one’s freedom is limited by one’s neurological organization — stereotypical patterns of action and reaction entrained through another type of kata training — the repetitive, habitual patterns of movement one arrives at simply by living. Proper kata training is, in fact, a means of teaching one’s nervous system new patterns of response. Without sufficient repetition — ideally, mindful aware repetition - the nervous system will not develop new interconnections to coordinate new patterns of response. It is, paradoxically, through limitation and delineation, that one is able to approach freedom.

To “get” Aikido you have to understand with your whole body. This means DOing. Aikido is a DO so we must do before we can understand.

Aikido is a Japanese martial art that includes techniques for bare-handed wrestling, using weapons, and dealing with the armed enemy.

We live, for the time being, in a softened and protected society. This may not last forever. How you comport yourself in the face of more, shall we say, feudal circumstances, greater challenges the future is to bring, remains to be seen. Will we, under similar circumstances, have the moral integrity and far reaching vision to intend to BUILD a world, a family of humanity, as the ancients displayed, starting out in really bad and primitive conditions? And to forge on despite all adversities that meet us? Who really knows.

Ki means many things to many people. There are many ways of defining it, ranging from scientific and bio-mechanical explanations to extremely spiritual viewpoints, and people’s feelings about it run the gamut of complete disbelief to mystical adulation. O Sensei believed in Ki, and he apparently talked and certainly wrote about it a lot. He did take a rather mystical approach to it, which can be rather hard to understand, and perhaps even harder to put to use in the actual practice of Aikido, let alone in daily life. I’m not going to debate the reality of Ki here, I’m just going to offer one way to look at it that may help some people relate to it, and perhaps even offer a way to bring it into their realm of experience.