Marc Abrams

Ellis Amdur raised a very interesting point that deserves a degree of both notice and caution.

When people began talking about IP/Aiki as the almost lost component in Aikido, it created a big stir. This is an example of a common dilemma when exploring paradigms of understanding/knowledge. Accepting that information required the person to make a paradigm shift in order to begin appreciate and then begin to understand what people were talking about. The previous paradigm had to do with the purely physical, technical movements that were considered the essence of waza. Now, you have people who come along and say "NO" there are things going on inside the body, and a different operating system for controlling the body that need to be recognized and utilized in order to really begin to do waza. The easiest thing for people to do, is to ignore this information, because it does not fit into a pre-existing paradigm. The hardest thing for people to do is to accept the limitations of an existing paradigm and open it up to scrutiny and change (shift) to create a new and different paradigm that places the information into a useable form.

People acknowledge that there are extraordinary events that occur in interactions with other people. People can acknowledge that there is a greater frequency of those concurrences amongst a subset of people that typically are very spiritual and unusually sensitive to their environment. The easiest thing to do is to discount those events as spurious, random events that become inappropriately linked to unusual thoughts and alleged experiences. The hardest thing to do, is to accept that there are things that do not neatly fit inside of our current paradigm of experiences and we don't quite know what to do with that.

Stories of O'Sensei's supernatural powers do exist. Some have been disproven and others have not. We have enough information to acknowledge that O'Sensei had IP/Aiki abilities that he had learned and developed within himself. We should also be open to the possibility of an added factor that could explain the "supernatural." I am quite the harsh skeptic. I will also be the first one to acknowledge that I have personally experienced some things with other people (and at least one personal experience) that simply did not fit within my existing paradigms of understanding. Rather than discount those experiences, I recognize that there exists the likelihood of events and things happening that I cannot fully appreciate, let alone, understand due to the limitations of my current paradigms of understanding.

We are asking other people to open themselves up to make the necessary paradigm shift necessary to become aware of the necessity to learn the IP/Aiki in order to come closer to doing O'Sensei's Aikido. That should not come at the expense or exclusion of other potential paradigm shifts that may be necessary to make as we move forward. Show me, is always the best policy. That being said, we might not be open enough to really appreciate the depths of what we are being shown. Keeping an open and a great deal of skepticism is my policy, what is yours..... (and I am not an Allstate agent...).

Marc Abrams