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Old 11-23-2011, 04:54 PM   #72
sorokod
Join Date: Sep 2008
Posts: 841
United Kingdom
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Re: A Primer on Aikido, Aiki and IS

Quote:
Lee Salzman wrote: View Post
If anything, it may be rather a measure of the unintended abuse humans put upon their bodies and the warped line of evolution through which we arrived at our peculiar form. Our bodies are evolutionary overkill, because they had to be to survive everything a silly monkey could do to it. That overkill can be exploited, but it is not very easy and requires a long and focused period of learning.
This is interesting. Are you saying that due to some evolutionary pressure the use of is/ip fell into disrepair? What would this pressure be? Also this implies that some earlier ancestor of ours did have is/ip. Is that your position?

Quote:
That's no different than elite level performance in any physical or mental endeavor. People are not just born sprinters or swimmers or cyclists or gymnasts or writers or astrophysicists or violinists. Sure, you can try to do any of those things without practice, you just will suck at it relative to what is possible. You have to actually develop your innate biological potential, it doesn't just happen on its own. We can already move, balance, absorb and generate power, feel, react, blah blah blah, without training, just rarely good enough to deal with the unpredictable nature of monkey-on-monkey combat.
Actually as presented it is quite different. If I want to become stronger I can devise some half baked training scheme and if I follow it I will become stronger. Not as strong as I could be with professional coaching and not as strong as top athletes, but stronger. Same for sprinting and other activities you mentioned. With is/ip as described here we have something qualitatively different. It is not more of the same, it is counterintuitive and it can not be acquired without a teacher (or can but with vanishingly small probability). If I am misrepresenting the is/ip case, please correct me.

Quote:
Also modern living style is mostly sedentary, so we spend a lot of time conditioning in bad movement and thinking habits and postural perversions. We also learn bad movement habits from our parents, who also most likely learned bad movement habits. Half the practice is just removing all the bad crap you've accumulated before starting training, which was allowed to develop because it was never physically stressed enough to fail, which, as far as one-trial human learning goes, gets interpreted as success.
How do you define modern? Since the industrial revolution? Do you believe that before "modern" times humans could tap into is/ip directly without a need to retrain themselves? How about those tribes in the Amazon basin (probably don't exist any more but just for illustration), are they (were they) in a ip/is state of grace?

As I was was writing this another question occurred, are humans are the only beings capable of achieving is/ip? If so why? If not who or what else?

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