George S. Ledyard

Hey Neil,
I am anything but a New Age guy but I use the term all the time.
We use "energy" largely to describe the intuitive aspect of of the human interaction. There are all sorts of areas in which we sense what are probably a whole host of complex signals, many of which we couldn't concsiously describe. "Energy" is an easy way to talk about it.

Gaven DeBaeker talks about this whole area in The Gift of Fear. He describes the messages we take in from our subliminal mind that we routinely tend to ignore because we are now modern and rational and are embarrassed to pay to much attention to feeling. Except that it's there and it's a part of our survival mechanism which we ignore at our own peril.

If you and I stood across from one another with swords, the most important elements of the fight would take place before I ever moved to cut you. I would dominate you with my spirit before anything else happened. By the time I attacked, you would not be able to effectively counter the attack. That's all done on the "energetic" level. You may not be able to measure it on some machine but it's there. And you can't do Aikido at a really high level without understanding it. The trick is to make your students aware of it and train it.

"Energy" is essentially the way O-Sensei looked at everything he did. Kototama is the study of the power of sound. It describes the various building blocks of the Universe in terms of vibration. All of the input you get from your sensory system is in terms of energy. You take in light through the eyes, sound through the ears, etc. It is a fact that the quality of what you take in effects your mindset. That's "energetic".

Our art is about Mind Body Spirit unification. Actually, our art is really about realizing that the unification is a fact already. In reality one can't separate the Mind-Body-Spirit aspects of ourselves. Our fundamental mistake is to act as if we could. Trying to remove the concept of "energy" (or whatever substitute term you wish to use) from the art would reduce the art to mere mechanics. That would take all the Aiki out of the Aikido.

I understand the reaction against the New Age types who talk about "energy" all the time and don't understand it at all in it's Aikido context. But that's just bad Budo, not a reason to ignore elements that are there in all human interactions and which are crucial to understand and utilize in the martial interaction.

Just as an aside, it's funny that all of the things which are most important to human beings are not material, measurable concepts: Love, honor, friendship, fulfillment, etc can't be touched or measured but they are some of the strongest motivating factors in human existence.