Quote:
Keith Gates wrote:
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.
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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.