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Old 08-10-2008, 09:18 PM   #76
Lee Salzman
Join Date: Nov 2005
Posts: 406
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Re: "Aiki" in Russian Video Clips

Quote:
Erick Mead wrote: View Post
If I am right, and I always acknowledge that I may be proved wrong in aspects of the whole or the parts, then aiki is NOT a conscious experience, no matter how you train it. The biomechanical limits of action mediated by spinal reflexes and some learned cerebellar patterning, does not leave time for cerebral appreciation in the moment of action. One recognizes that it HAS happened, but one is not consciously directing that it happen or be deployed in particular way. It may be restrained or leashed, in many regards, but that gets into the issues of the place of will in training, so I leave it there.

If so, then it cannot be a matter of common experience, because what is occurring is not within the realm of conscious experience. The brain has difficulty communicating the experience to other parts of the brain, much less symbolically to other people. These debates therefore will always recur. The variety of the ways that O Sensei's Deshi responded to their perceptions of the art are testament to that. Even if the repeat players in these debates all kicked off tomorrow, the debate would resume with new people and perspectives, because everyone of them is looking at an experience that must be reconstructed cerebrally, when it is primarily reflexive and cerebellar, and not within easy reach of our symbolic representation.

It is in the realm of conscious awareness to create training for improving such intuitive action, but only the training, not the action, is subject to the conscious will. But the critical view ofthe action sought, by whatever method, is always at one remove from the reality of the thing itself. It is in this sense (as much as the ethical sense, which I will leave aside as you request) that I address the place of the will in directing the body in training.
Is this really THAT profound an idea, though? When put in a violent, uncontrolled situation where events are happening and changing faster than the conscious mind can process, then the barrier to speed of action is conscious thought.

The only method I learned for training this is conditioning via automation and association, that movement must be drilled to a point where it can be executed, with reference to an actual observable event (via one of the senses), so that it just happens with as little conscious intervention as possible. Likewise, that the body has to be trained to deal with stresses in a variety of improvised situations, but this improvisation has to be done up front - by simply practicing movement from and to as varied a set of practical positions as possible - and that they have to be reinforced while being careful to remove all deliberate delay or habitual thinking preceding or interrupting action.

What other way would there be?