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Cliff Judge wrote:
I am saying that the whole process of you bringing aiki down to a level where it can exist in terms of "what you want to do with it" limits your potential. This more boils down to taking the washer/dryer combo over Door Number Two which is fine. Seems to me that this has been established as a lesser path hundreds of years ago...just my take on it. Your outline certainly has understandable appeal.
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The most I can say is I was never presented with the choice of washer/dryer or Door Number Two within aikido. I was shown how to do plenty of aikido waza and plenty of hand-wringing as to how somehow 40 years from now I would figure out what aiki was, training from the outside in, it would just happen without me realizing it. Oh, that's just the 20 year throw, or that's just the 30 year pin! Aikido might be better to name techniques by the number of decades people commonly assign to their learning process.
I looked at my own progress, that of my sempais, and that of my senseis, and what I was seeing just was doing nothing to reassure me that it was a path which followed to completion would yield any insight into what aiki was. About the only coherent answer to the question boiled down to - see such and such shihan, isn't he amazing? Oh, everyone had hypotheses about what's going on, but as unique and bountiful as snowflakes. And when I started going out just testing the results of my labor? The results were certainly not pretty. I had learned a catalogue of things to do under various situations, but funnily enough, in even the most menial of martial encounters that did not fit within the mold of aikido if X then Y practice, I was pretty hosed. Even if I had the setup for X, the Y never came to be - but hey, it worked in the dojo!
Then I was shown, explicitly, aiki, just not from within aikido, training from the inside out, that put things in a far more logical order - first develop aiki, then apply it to waza if so inclined - not the reverse. So, huzzah, it's something I can both rationally understand and train in focused manner, so that, maybe before I die, I will be able to competently apply it!
And even if Morihei Ueshiba was a outlier genius in his development of aiki, wouldn't it be somewhat absurd to make us all rediscover it if on our own, which, the theory goes, requires unusual genius in the first place, if there was an explicit method by which to learn it? Where is the concise methodology for teaching beyond if uke does X, nage does Y, that explains the core of what students are trying to learn from the beginning? I never got to see it, if it existed.
So if the choice is washer/dryer combo and Door Number Two, somehow I ended up with gold and jewels and I'm not regretting it.
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So you are saying that you develop IP in order to - eventually, somewhere down the line - develop aiki? So are you saying you have already attained such a level of skill with IP that you can being to apply / use / make aiki? Otherwise your viewpoint is predictive, right? You are speaking from a viewpoint you expect to have once you have attained future, expected understanding?
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You can develop IP and aiki concurrently, no need to be an expert at IP to work on aiki, but the failures related to lack of IP skill become very pronounced the more you try to do aiki. Like all things, the better you become at it, the better the results you get, but you do not have to be a master of it to get useful results from it. Just like I don't have to be a world-class chef to not burn my food on the stove.