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Old 09-10-2009, 08:55 AM   #10
Erick Mead
 
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Dojo: Big Green Drum (W. Florida Aikikai)
Location: West Florida
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Re: Aikido - Martial Arts - Fighting

Quote:
Mark Murray wrote: View Post
I think history indicates that Ueshiba was not a pacifist, his spiritual ideals weren't new-age love and peace, and that he gained his spirituality alongside his martial abilities.
I find that as I continue on, the more and more restrained I have to become -- because I am more and more capable of doing untintended damage by merely moving in connected flow. Strikes just appear and have to be constrained from what would occur if action were more fully uninhibited. It is dare I say, deeply enticing and yet forbidding at the same time. Only the care, dare I say, love, that the spirit of the art has fostered toward my training partners compels the restraint from giving in to the sense of abandon in destruction that the nature of the actual mechanics employed in this art make possible (whether any particular person is making use of them is another matter, but believe me, they are absolutely there).

The best recent dramatic meditation on this aspect of what I see as "True Budo is Love." was in the BBC's "Jekyll" series, played by the masterful James Nesbitt. I highly recommend the whole series. Suffice it to say the series works to show Hyde, Jekyll's alter ego as a superhumanly powerful, deeply lustful, profligately dissolute and exceedinlgy capable of great violence at the drop of a hat -- if provoked, or merely bored -- and capable of withstanding an incredible amount of physical damage without either caring much about it -- or slowing down, much less stopping from getting to his desired objective.

In this clip, which the series has built up in terms of Mr. Hyde's willingness to kill with ease and lack of concern and then his intricate dance of predatory stalking of Jekyll's wife Mrs. Jackman, and their children, you get the penultimate climax of the series, and confrontation with the supposed "social protectors" who want to duplicate his power -- only for good, you understand, carefully controlled, and managed, of course. Yet it turns out that his immense power of destruction has only ever had but one single and consuming source -- which is also its purpose. It is a very deep lesson in the nature of love, manipulation, protection and violence.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjU-P-m-IKk


[For those with a good Catholic education -- note the hour on the clock.]

Last edited by Erick Mead : 09-10-2009 at 09:02 AM.

Cordially,

Erick Mead
一隻狗可久里馬房但他也不是馬的.
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