View Single Post
Old 07-15-2008, 04:33 PM   #82
Josh Lerner
 
Josh Lerner's Avatar
Location: Renton, WA
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 80
United_States
Offline
Re: Seiseki Abe Sensei video....whats going on here?

Quote:
Shaun Ravens wrote: View Post
Hi Josh,

SO GLAD YOU ASKED!!!!! the simple answer is, "NO!" - I would say that your conclusion is based upon a "Western minded" method of analysis. This is not a case where we compare when I make you cry by hitting you and you make me cry by hitting me harder. We know where that will lead us. This is more of a case where you want to hit me, but I make you cry from loving you. Where might that lead us?
Thank you for making my point for me! If I wanted to hit you, but you made me cry from loving me, it means that you were better at loving me than I was at wanting to hit you. Maybe that's because I didn't really want to hit you - I just wanted attention, or some sort of human connection.

But what if you weren't so good at loving me - maybe your love was tainted without you realizing it by self-concern, or judgement, or was conditional? And if I really just wanted to hit you? Then maybe I would be better at hitting you than you were at loving me, and then I made you cry.

In my Western-minded way of looking at it, it still comes down to who is, in some sense, better at what they do. And both things require experience or training, and you grow in your skills.

Quote:
Shaun Ravens wrote: View Post
Now imagine what it would look like if we tried as hard as we could to not fight at all. Instantly there would also be peace, peace of a very different sort.
I don't understand your point about both of us trying as hard as we could not to fight. Sure, that's a very different kind of peace. One that wouldn't require any martial training at all to uphold, in fact. I'm personally not very interested in training in an art that allows me to stay peaceful only in the face of an attacker who is trying very hard not to fight with me.

Quote:
Shaun Ravens wrote: View Post
You see, while you may have viewed what I was talking about as opposites skills, they are not skills which are out to produce the same result at all. This is a categoric shift in thinking produced by the way of Aiki. I don't think that is in any way the same as what Dan is talking about when he talks about AIkido, or Aiki...do and how that relates to Power and Connection from his view of things.

.
Well, I would say that they are both out to produce the same result in the sense that the result is that you keep yourself (or other people) safe in the face of aggression. How you are doing that may be categorically different, or it may not, but either way it's still going to be a skill that you need to deepen through practice and experience, just like gaining internal power is.

And as for the rest of you . . . You know that I am a strictly materialistic Cartesian dualist who doesn't go in for all that Buddho-Daoist stuff.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Some of my best friends are Eastern-minded.

Josh
  Reply With Quote