jonreading

In a sense, yes. As I see other applications of aiki the question arises, what if two people are doing aiki and they meet? The end of the Universe, obviously. Otherwise, I think the person leading the spiral energy has the advantage. However, the person following the spiral is not yet undone (kuzushi) until such a point as that spiral breaks the defender's ability to manage the force. Messisco sensei does this in his ukemi all the time - you are never leading his ukemi spiral so when he just decides to change, you realize you were never leading that dance.

I like the "drive the bus" because I don't think at higher levels we should equate kuzushi with "winning". It is probably better to think of kuzushi as the first step to undoing your partner. Back to our judo parallels, there is a reason why judo players do not equate kuzushi with a throw (it is only a step of a process). In aikido, we have this idea of "kuzushi on contact" - the undoing of our partner as a consequence of coming into contact with us. This is the aiki body. Every time we touch our partner, we should feel there is a mismanagement of our body so we can find it and fix it. As we train, we should see two outcomes: 1. it should be more difficult to create kuzushi in our body, 2. it should be easier for us to fix kuzushi in our body.

If you have ever trained with Ikeda sensei, he does this thing where he can put energy and unbalance into specific parts of your body. Usually, it's the knees, hips, shoulders or elbows. Its very precise instruction to illustrate a problem in your body. The better your aiki body, the stronger you can illustrate the problem.

Back to Ross's post, I am not sure I would argue kuzushi is something distributed through an interaction of two or more people. Aiki is not a four-legged animal and there are a number of threads on that topic. Rather, kuzushi is a symptom of a state of being that should emanate from me (but not affect me). Aiki is not sympathetic; it can be empathetic. We sometimes argue it because we kinda realize that we are also out of whack as nage - it's a convenient excuse for our own mismanagement. That's not what we should be doing, though. I think we sometimes attribute roles to nage as a white-hat character and create duelistic relationships between uke and nage. Uke can attack with violence but nage should not. Uke is aggressive, but nage should not be. I do not believe training in duelism is either productive (because half of your training is "wrong") or efficient (because half of your training is not doing aikido). But it does often craft a character of good guy and bad guy.

My instructor used to speak about uke's obligation to resolve waza. Nage's responsibility was to create a legitimate scenario of kuzushi. Uke's responsibility was to safely resolve that kuzushi. The aiki body creates a distinct and demonstrable illustration of kuzushi that uke should not be able to ignore. This exacerbated state of mismanagement should give uke the feedback to find resolution. From this perspective nage is "helping" uke to recognize where/when her body is out of whack and give her the opportunity to fix the problem. I think if we choose to remain in the realm of "doing" something to create kuzushi, we are not transcending our jujutsu curriculum. Ideally, we want our very standing to be a cause of kuzushi. If nothing else, this is the state where we can best help our partner to understand their problems.