Nev’s reply

Nev’s reply
This began as a simple thank you for Alister Gillies’s, “Change As Part of the Cycle of Movement in Aikido,” article.
But then what his words inspired began to travel. I did a word count. 🙂 As it turned out I could not convey what I wanted to say briefly. Again. Apologies. I could say it in 15 words or less but then it would be saying something else.

Well, here goes..
The Founder, Morihei Ueshiba did not consider Aikido as a separate “other” art at odds with or in competition with anything else, rather all embracing and inclusive. Aikido is not another opinion to contend over, rather one of several valid methods of discovery. The Do resides in the journey of personal discovery, not opinions, not mine, not your, not his or hers or theirs or in “other” ways to perform a technique. The “best” Aikido is the one that works best for you in your uniqueness. Simply training and discovering is the Way and no teacher worth his salt pontificates “his way, ” rather serves to augment YOUR WAY. We are all unique.
Without magazines, such as Aikido journal (where are they) which strive to minimize biases, rather report on as full a spectrum as possible be this technical, practical, conceptual or “spiritual, it is considerably difficult to find quotations from Morihei which have not been doctored in accordance with some bias or another, even misunderstandings. Such cannot be helpful.
Consider the fundamental principles at stake: War, peace and beyond. What is beyond?
War represents contention, clashing and all the mental and psychic malware dysfunction that this uncompleted complex species is heir to. “Peace” is an illusion, stagnation leading to death of everything. Nota bene, tyrants have always given a duplicitous “peace speech” when they were rallying to initiate aggressive wars.
Movement being life and friction being inevitable, it seems to stand to reason that “beyond” will be found in reconciliation of conflict and not “better” ways to fail by adding to violence using forked rhetoric. Aikido is a discipline that naturally awakens UNIVERSAL PRINCIPLES innate in existence and already embodied in all of us, bringing them to life, even in the midst of the inevitable inertia and conflict that attempts to stop it from happening. It’s not a game. Morihei addressed this salient feature just about every time he spoke for the longer period of his fruitful life.
He made no pretences, no inordinate claims, no claims of being “the next avatar, ” or “saviour” or any of the other bogus parochial belief riddled claims which have been responsible for most of the history of war and theft.
To some, not equipped to listen and understand he may have appeared “eccentric,” even loopy.
He simply strove in his life to marry the practical and the ideal (“Uniting Heaven and Earth”) as best as he could in the circumstances he found himself. To a great extent he succeeded as much as was humanly possibly for him. His foibles and “eccentricities” in the face of his global achievement (whether intended or not) are irrelevant. In nature unconsciousness is no excuse. He strove to make himself and those around him conscious. Waking up early is often uncomfortable. That’s the price. The core laws of nature and the universe are immutable. If you can’t take your feathers being ruffled in the pursuit of waking up, you relegate yourself to insignificance in the scheme of things since Nature is ruthless. Predictability is the faculty which enables survival best, in any sphere. Aikido, properly practiced vivifies predictability skills in numerous spheres. Beyond sen-no-sen is Ai-no-sen.
In the dojo we provide modulated discord in the attacks and then learn to harmonize these using our own skill faculties. That’s the all of it. Everything else is window dressing.
Natural attrition will achieve this result over long spans of time. Humans have the unique ability to shorten what takes Nature and serendipity aeons.
On this basis competent, capable, experienced teachers are essential, not optional. Titles can be flushed along with their worth. Either you can or can not. Practicality cannot be divorced from so called “spirituality.” And politics has no place in Aikido. Those who use it define and expose themselves thereby.
Meeting discomfort viably is the shugyo of Aikido. Dispassionately rendering the energy of attack harmonious, the skill and the misogi of Aikido.
Ueshiba already said this repeatedly and in a number of ways. My long meanderings are merely the boring spelling out of what he already made clear so succinctly, exercising different viewing points and nothing new and I always appreciate it when people say it better. People miss Ueshiba’s simple message for its obviousness. Higher logic has a tendency to appear “invisible” as serious IT specialists, for example can attest.
Morihei would have made one kick-ass hacker. In fact he was and still is. Look around you. The Aikido virus, the same as that of enlightenment, is so virulent it is unstoppable. It has made a huge rift in “The Matrix” of delusionality and mental illness and “infected” the planet irretrievably, much to the chagrin of various tyrants who are finding it more and more difficult to foment war, theft and all the rotten vices they strive too hard to impose on a world not really interested in doing things backwards. But it did not begin with Morihei. From time to time there have always been messengers who would attempt to indicate towards the same central maxim of the universe. Over time men’s minds will find a way to twist simplicity and turn it into something else. That’s why cultish tribal religiosity, (not individual awakening) has always fomented or been used to foment war, as history confirms.
If we all stopped training tomorrow Aikido would continue, morphing into whatever it needs to be as it always had when it preceded the Aikido we now know and was then relegated other labels. The universe has preordained that light continue penetrating darkness and not the other way around. Material science can do no other than confirm this as well. This process is the nature of the universe itself, a foregone and inevitable conclusion. We can resist it at our peril or simply choose what Morihei and others before and after him propounded, to “Nurture, care, protect and propagate the creative principle in all life.” It is progressively gaining ascendancy anyhow. Immutably. Anything that chooses addiction to the destructive path, as history and prehistory has already written and woven into the very fabric of existence, becomes extinct. This another lesson of Aikido.
As for dojo fees and trivia, to all those who obsess with making excuses, GET A JOB, for pity’s sake. MEET LIFE. AIKIDO REALITY not some kind of puerile safety blanket of quasi-samurai make-believe circus. So long as a dojo can break even to maintain basic costs of your garage rental, mats and lighting TEACH FOR FREE AS I DO! Charge only for dojo upkeep. Be self-reliant as a warrior must. Find other means to serve society for money.
The gain of Aikido will be around bearing fruit long after money as we now know it has become obsolete. The gain of Aikido will not be found in the ideas we may have of money, a tragically misunderstood tool, which has also added to war because of the spiritual disease of greed which tries to collect it and store it rather than keep it circulating. ALL KI, IN ALL ITS FORMS, MUST BE IN MOTION IN ORDER TO CONTINUE TO REMAIN HEALTHY. Stagnant chi is disease. The gain of Aikido, rather is in the core integrity of the human being in their eternal, creative “make-something-out-of-nothing” aspect. (“Making something out of nothing,” in other words: Just do it!, was another favourite of Morihei. But how many people have heard it? Or, “Change is the movement of Nature and the Universe. Place yourself into accord..”?) For this we need adaptable yet core-strong individuals of integrity capable and willing to notice and to think for themselves and as O’Sensei gruffly but succinctly put it: “Work it out for yourself!”
The journey is the destination.

Thank you Alistair, I particularly appreciate your incisive well articulated article in an area so difficult to verbalise.
I hear that you have written a book and would love to get my hands on a copy.
What is you book titled and where may it be obtained please?

Very best regards,

Nev