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Old 10-10-2012, 06:56 PM   #30
David Orange
Dojo: Aozora Dojo
Location: Birmingham, AL
Join Date: Feb 2006
Posts: 1,511
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Re: Who's missing out? (On "Promotion and advertising" rhetoric)

Quote:
Graham Christian wrote: View Post
Ahh, my old friend David. I see you divide things into two groups. Mmmmm. Interesting.
No, you have divided it that way, since your first post. I just put names on the two groups you described and further delineated the characteristics of each group.

Of course...in martial arts, only one of those groups is even considered to exist. The other is not even noticed.

Quote:
Graham Christian wrote: View Post
I see your view on the ways of the 'science side' and I would say that is quite apt to how those who consider themselves such do things.
It was how O Sensei did things. And I'm way more artist than scientist in my approach to life.

The IP side works only from O Sensei--not from Kisshomaru or forward. That, which you represent, if anything, is "modern" aikido. The "scientific" side is "old" aiki.

Quote:
Graham Christian wrote: View Post
Now the 'arty side?' Nah, never met any like that. So I see no 'arty side' except in peoples heads.
Well, that and the lack of aiki in their bodies....and maybe the hats they choose...

Quote:
Graham Christian wrote: View Post
I thought traditionalists, according to your 'cohorts' as you put it, were those who followed along doing what they were told whilst the inner secrets were withheld from them. Now that would make your 'open' methods quite new and modern would it not.
No. Your "traditionalists" are rooted in the 1960s or 70s.

My traditionalists are from the 1930s and 1940s. Guys like Mochizuki and Shioda didn't follow along doing what they were told. If there was a secret to be had, they made sure to get it. It was the people who came along following Tohei's split who began losing the way.

Quote:
Graham Christian wrote: View Post
Add to that that modern day and age is media orientated and we are continually bombarded with scurrilous designed to make you feel like you are lacking and therefore need to have then you can see presenting something in a similar way could be considered just as scurrilous. The presentation, not the thing itself.
Well, there's your problem, right there. "The presentation" is in your perception. The "scientific" cohort does not put this out as something "to make you feel like you are lacking and therefore need to have."

The noise from the scientific cohort is endless iterations of "EUREKA!" It's positive excitement and JOY at a fantastic discovery that was there all along, like gravity or displacement of water.

You hear the noise and look in and people say, "Look what we have discovered!"

And you say, "I already know that. I do all that."

Oooohhhhhh.

So your pride in your own understanding leads you to disrespect people who know something you've never glimpsed and when they bounce you out, you start hearing the "EUREKA!" differently, through a wounded ego, and when you can't get in any other way, we get passive-aggressive threads like this from you.

Quote:
Graham Christian wrote: View Post
I see my hat still leads your mind. I must admit seeing you bounce backwards across the room like some poltergeist had got you took my mind for a second.
Really? Poltergeist?

What if I can keep my place and drive a big guy even further across the room than that, with just as little movement?

Would you consider that "poltergeist-like"?

Is that the kind of "invisible" power you can produce?

It's just one expression of the kind of energy-sourcing that creates aiki.

But your problem has really been two-fold. By that I mean that there are two groups here that give you most of the grief you get. Other groups provide some peripheral grief, but let's just look at the two main ones.

Traditionalist aikidoka
IP/IS aikidoka

The traditionalists who believe that aiki is external "blending" with the external movement of an attacker's body, see you in the Golden Center Aikido videos and protest vehemently because it appears that you are literally "selling" something as aikido that definitely is not real aikido. I am among this group as, I believe, is Henry Ellis Sensei. And, truth be told, pretty much everyone on here with a few years of serious aikido experience, even in the "general art" group, seems to think that you're presenting a corrupted practice without even knowing it.

You respond by saying that you're teaching ki and principles. Traditionalists wonder, "Why didn't Ueshiba do it that way, then?" Most of them are just too polite to criticize you, but Mochizuki Sensei would not have hesitated and you see a similar spirit from Ellis Sensei.

However, with your claims to be teaching "ki," you step into the IP/IS field and even declare that you can do what Uehsiba did. We would like to see that on video. And I do count myself also among this group that knows that ki development and use is not as you describe it and believe that while selling a particularly corrupt outer form as aikido, you're also selling a meaningless explanation of "ki" and unsound ways of developing it.

Meanwhile, you're constantly taking the IP/IS people to task for failing to grasp your unique approach to the art as "the same" as what they're doing.

Problem is, it's not.

And you get flak from both sides, but you seem to credit all your grief only to the IP/IS group, maybe because more than a few of us fall into both groups--enough IP/IS to know you're on the wrong trail entirely; and enough "regular" aikido to know that you're not teaching that right, either. So it seems like it's all IP/IS people who object to your presentation, but it isn't. It's IP and it's Tradition. The Modern Aikido side places niceties above the qualities of the arts.

But the fact that you see everyone's excitement and joy at finding IP/IS and interpret it as "promotion" intended to make you feel "that you are missing out or less than" just shows that the problem starts with you. You want to be included, of course. Everyone wants to be included. But we all experience rejection at times in life because we want the group's respect on our own criteria rather than the group's, even while stepping on its truths and insulting the individuals involved.

Instead, why don't you consider listening to what the IP/IS side is really saying? Why don't you find out what they've seen that has impressed them so much?

David

Last edited by akiy : 10-10-2012 at 10:14 PM. Reason: Fixed quote tag

"That which has no substance can enter where there is no room."
Lao Tzu

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