David Orange

It strikes me as an elaborate abstraction not of aikido itself but of an analogy of aikido.

The real question is, would you demonstrate that your abstraction results in the kinds of things we're talking about? Can you show the power as well as diagram it?

A lot of Japanese English students have really good grammar on paper, but their pronunciation and spirit fall apart when they have to look at a Westerner and actually speak. And the same with my Japanese, only without the good grammar.

Likewise with a lot of aikido. It doesn't hold water. Or fire. Or both.

I can see how you related your picture to the words of the masters, but I don't feel a connection. It made me think of what I like to call Sazae-san Syndrome in language learning.

In listening to Japanese speakers, it took me a long time to realize that their topics of conversation were always shifting and the little story I'd made up of what they were talking about, which I thought was a single narrative, was just a collage of moments from four, five or six or more different discussions over just a few minutes. They talk about the weather, the families, work, and then maybe they start talking about a TV show they'd seen the night before. You think they're still talking about one of their own kids but they're talking about a cartoon character, and the next thing, they're talking economics and it ends up with the prime minister.

In other words, it seems like you're not really penetrating the real, flowing thing we're discussing, as if you're going straight while the man on the bridge is turning in a spiral.

For instance, from your quote of Abe Sensei:

"In a case of Aikido, there are invisible heart and breathe there. And, if one trains the method of breathing mainly by oneself, one's own Aikido will be established. The way of training of body is depend on where one places Minakanushi. It means that heart, breathe, and body should be united and, when one practices, heart, breathe, and body must be located at the center."

Even after all these years and what I've been learning, my impulse to the words "located at the center" is to feel my "one-point." Many people would read that English sentence and translate it as "located at the one-point" or maybe "hara."

What do you think?

As for the rest of it, it affects me like someone moving their hands around explaining a theory that might be right, like I do when I talk about Einstein, without personally being able to demonstrate the theory I think I generally understand. So no matter how I move my hands to draw my picture of the theory, all the power (whatever there is of it) is in my words and not in my hands.

In other words, if you don't have a million dollars, how credible will your "Make a Million Dollars" book be?

In other words, don't show your work. Show it work.

So now I'll make a video and post it.

Thanks.

David