Bits and pieces

“Zen ken shu!” my white-bearded painting and calligraphy teacher said to me one day. “Zen meditation is the sword is the brush! Understand one and you understand all. But you cannot come to understand one without the other two.”

The three principles of aikido are kokyu-ryoku, tai-no-sabaki, and ki-no-musubi. Each of these principles is used to properly train and execute every aikido technique.

So if losing the attitude, losing the blindspot, losing the stupidity is what Aikido helps one do, sure, add it to your list of things to try out. Move it up on your “bucket list” you should have made when you were a kid realizing that you ain’t gonna live forever and there are things you want to do before you die.

When we can’t run away, aikido can give us another way to respond, a way that is neither fight nor flight. Aikido says: “Don’t fight. Don’t flee either. Let go instead. Let go of the whole situation. Go inside it. Follow it through. Use only your intuition”.

In most ancient cultures, lasting thousands of years longer than the stultified, limping histories we laud so much because of a few gadgets, their story survived all manner of attrition because of something that transcends all gadgets: Respect. In these true civilizations based on higher, more noble values of contribution, rather than mere fear of lack, it was mandatory to be a well rounded, highly skilled participant of the mechanism of the group, tribe nation, whatever. As part of this, an initiatory schooling which combined connectedness with heaven and earth, all the directions and the Centre of existence foremost; multi-skilled warrior training, hunting, gathering, farming including natural horticulture or as now labelled permacultiure, animal husbandry, communication skills, social technologies of the era, sciences of the era, healing arts and all the attributes which have nowadays become considerably specialised, were mandatory learning before one could claim humanity. Storytellers became the historians of the tribal ways evolving into the archivists of today. Ability in all the required skills of the era were the expectation of a well rounded human being who considered not only all human beings, but indeed all life and creation as manifestations of the sacred.

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.