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Old 09-27-2011, 11:07 AM   #34
lbb
Location: Massachusetts
Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 3,202
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Re: Discussion of Spirituality from an Aikido Perspective.

Quote:
Keith Gates wrote: View Post
For me Aikido is much like a Zen Koan, it asks of us a seemingly impossible question, this acts to force us into a state of intuition. Latent forces, can by definition, not be seen but are only to be felt and known through intuition. They cannot be clearly understood intellectually.
For me, I'd say it's more like an inductive proof. Most people only ever learn deductive reasoning: A leads to B, B leads to C, and so on. But there's also this thing called inductive reasoning, where you start by assuming that what you want to prove is so...then prove a base case...then prove that if the base case is true for x, it's also true for x+1. Aikido is like that: I see someone doing something, I can't see how they're doing it (I can't deduce it)...but I can see that it is being done. So the conclusion is true, I just don't know (yet) how to get from here to there. And that's where I have to start out by "proving" (on the mat, the hard way) that the base case is true...and then it's a long, long series of "proving" that if it's true for x, it's also true for x+1.
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