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Lee Salzman wrote:
It's not like you can go to your local xingyiquan or baguazhang or random koryu group and have any guarantee of learning the subject matter in question. Many accumulated miles of doing piquan and hours of circle walking on my part later, I became pretty convinced they were just repeating the same, "Just do it for 20 years and you'll figure it out" mantra. ---snipsky-- It's no walk in the park, even if you really really really want to learn from somebody.
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Heh. Exactly. In fact, if you read many things posted by a lot of teachers, they've already got the goods. And as Dan points out, then you meet them......
It's really a crapshoot. "You pays your money, you takes your chances..... step right up folks!" There's not going to be any effective systemization, even though that may be possible (Tohei, in essence, attempted to do just that). I personally see it as something that is going to be difficult to manage successfully for any large group of people.
First of all, even though there are these ongoing discussions and they started, to be fair, with Tohei, there aren't that many people whom anyone can go to for information. If it was that easy, there would not have been as much difficulty in obtaining information as there obviously has been. We don't really know who,
if anyone, "has the goods", do we? Tohei has them, it would appear, but could he release power in the way that Ueshiba could do it? I'm not sure, either way. Abe Sensei... same question. Inaba. Sunadomari. Shioda. At the highest level, it's difficult to really say and that will be a conversation for people to puzzle out in the future as skills get more widespread.
Ushiro Sensei? He's got demonstrable jin-skills and undoubtedly a certain amount of the breathing, etc., skills.... but how much does he have and how much of it is congruent with the soft-approach training that Ueshiba had? Any port in a storm, I allus sez, but still, all these things have to be considered. Akuzawa's approach? Dan's approach? Mike's approach? These are all different approaches to the basics and each person has his own skill(s) to show for them, but a consideration of learning the basics versus "how do I mesh this into Aikido" has to go on in peoples' heads. Or at least that would be my caution. The cat is coming out of the bag, but there are all kinds of breeds of cats.
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George S. Ledyard wrote:
If it's left to individual teachers scattered around the country to decide to incorporate these new ideas into their training, it will be a long time before things in general will take a jump upward, quality wise. Things need to reach a sort of critical momentum before large scale shifts are seen.
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I think many people are into Aikido (and other arts... this will happen in many different arts before it's all said and done) for many different reasons. Many people are into Aikido for more socially-oriented reasons and they're not going to be part of any large-scale shift toward these skills. It's too much trouble and they're not really that motivated. Their schools will continue and their offshoots will founder if and when these changes are made, but only over a period of years. Time passes; things change.
Best.
Mike