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Old 11-24-2011, 03:49 PM   #54
CorkyQ
Dojo: Kakushi Toride Aikido
Location: Los Angeles
Join Date: Mar 2008
Posts: 111
United_States
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Re: Violence and Aikido

Quote:
Ahmad Abas wrote: View Post
Everyone watches a master swordsman wield a blade with awe. There is beauty in his kata...
Why do you open your mouth in wonder? Don't you see death in his every cut?

I think there is a distinction, natural violence and a violent mind. Violence is relative to a persons concept of it. Some believe the cutting up of human beings are an act of violence. Yet we do cut people up with very sharp blades no less... To save him. Are they violent acts? No, they are compassionate but natural acts of violence so to speak. Natural to the instigator whose job is to cut you up to save you. And violent to the patient whose very body seeks to avoid the pain and trauma of being cut up.

A violent mind however is unnatural. A predator doesn not hunt with malevolence but the act of killing is violence. But not unnatural. Violence of the mind is when you seek to destroy not in keeping to your true self or purpose.

Thus the violent mind is what does not come to the aikido equation. Yet if natural violence were to occur, then so be it.
I love what you've written. I think we must be diligent, though, in not using the truth in what you are saying to rationalize harming another person in our pursuit of self-defense. Aikido gives us a tool to respond non-violently to violence, natural or otherwise. But this is a tool that also can be used for violence much the same way a pitch fork could. With (as Mary Heiny says) diligent self-scrutiny we can progress toward a point in time in which the threat of violence produces no fear response because there is no longer any violence in our own hearts.
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